I heard about Roan Parrish's masterpiece through Twitter and was excited to read it from the first. Well, I finally did, and the experience was a little more mixed than I thought it would be.

The Remaking of Corbin Wale tells the romance of baker Alex Barrow and the titular Corbin. After he loses his NYC job and boyfriend in the space of a week, Alex decides to move back to his family home in Michigan before a piano drops on him (his words, not mine, and they made me laugh). Since his mother wants to retire their family's coffee shop anyway, Alex takes it over and reopens the place as And Son bakery. Once And Son opens, in steps Corbin, a local part time worker and loner, and the pair feel an instant connection. The bulk of the novel is spent with Alex getting Corbin to open up and Corbin putting several personal demons to rest so he can be with Alex.

The writing is drop-dead gorgeous: powerful, ethereal, and strange to create the perfect atmospheric mood for the piece. The story danced lovingly on the tipping point of melancholic and warm. The descriptions of characters, settings, and baking were mouth-watering and lavish. The slow burn romance between Alex and Corbin was incredibly satisfying. A subplot emerges with Alex's best friend Gareth coming to town to escape an abusive relationship, and it was rewarding in its own right (and possibly sequel worthy?). The rep is pleasantly diverse: Alex's family is Jewish, Corbin was raised ambiguous pagan, and several of the characters are of color. Before the ending, I was ready to give the story five stars.

Parrish went to great lengths to root this story among the in-between space of realism and magical realism. Perhaps a little too in-between for me. We're given hints that Alex may have siren or Pied Piper-esque persuasive powers, while Corbin believes he has a family curse and shares a lot of characteristics with changelings. Parrish immediately shrugs these ideas off as frameworks to understand Corbin's unusual childhood and Alex's charismatic personality. In literature, magic and magical creatures are ciphers and frameworks after all, and it's suggested that Corbin is using them to process his trauma and loneliness. However, I think the timing was off for me. Because from the beginning I knew this universe didn't have magic, Corbin's efforts to rid himself of the family curse felt...silly? Not exactly silly, but the tone switched from being with Corbin and to more looking outside him, pitying the "poor traumatized man" who was transfixed by a self-delusion. As a mentally ill person myself, the pitying fascination made me uncomfortable. The intersection of mental illness/trauma and magical powers is a contested one, and I don't think Parrish quite pulled it off here. The story might have gone better as straight up magical realism.

My other quibble is equally personal in nature and may not bother other readers. The poetic language has a delightful focus on the natural world, which I like, but extended to sex, which caused me to panic about drowning and being buried alive in beach sand. I had a weird feeling that Corbin and Alex could be replaced by women and be exactly the same: during the sex scene, I was especially thrown out of the story by the use of the word "quake" because I have literally only seen it in wlw fiction before this. Ultimately gender is pointless, we need to destroy the binary etc etc, but this lack of masculine feel may be why I don't see a lot of mlm reviewing this book.

All and all, while I'm not bouncing up and down in delight, I respect Roan Parrish as an artist with brilliant wordcrafting skills. I'll be interested in what she does next with such honed, lovely talent and recommend The Remaking of Corbin Wale to fantasy romance fans trying to get into contemporary or vice versa.