The Breaths We Take follows seventeen-year-old Ben. The story is set in 1992, and well, he really wants a boyfriend. That is at least the first impression we get from him, as he sexualizes every guy he can find as soon as his eyes falls upon them. His organized life turns on its head when his sick grandfather comes and lives with his family.

I don’t really know how to write this, but the story the author is trying to give us here does not reach its potential. I love a cute, fluffy lgbt+ read, with some drama and family on the side, but here the writing, the characters and the plot just falls flat.

Ben is thrown into a match up scheme between two of his best friends, and it goes (surprise surprise) horribly wrong. And it is fine to have misunderstanding, but these guys here had been friends for years and that erupted into nothing over something so stupid?

Ben is also starts working at this elder center, and at first he doesn’t want to because old people makes him uncomfortable? I guess every person and character is different, but there was this big revolutionary thing where he realized that old people is actually just… people. I guess there was supposed to be a lesson in there not just for Ben, but for the reader. But it does not really come across well. It is just like everything else in this book: flat.

Ben gets a boyfriend in this book, and while they were cute there was so much unnecessary drama. I wanted to ship them, but I really felt it was so random they ended up together. What made Ben and his boyfriend like each other? Because even after finishing I’m still not sure except that they think the other one is hot.

There was also some homophobia in here, but that is called out. But again, it was there for the drama. I know the story was set in 1992 and everything, but where the homophobia came from made me roll my eyes. I don’t want to spoil, but it was really just stupid. The book is trying to show us what lgbt+ teens has gone through “over the decades”, but I felt it didn’t really give us anything.

There were parts of the story that were okay. I loved Ben’s grandfather and Herman (which is another old man). The story itself wrapped up okay, but overall I was not impressed. Ben was too boring, and the writing was not really my style.

The book is not bad, it was just okay. I would never recommended it to anyone, as I know of so much better lgbt+ stories. This story doesn’t give anything to the reader, it was not as if I had high expectations going into this (as I had never heard about it before), but I did hope I was going to get more than this.

Thank you so much to Netgalley for providing me with an eArc.