Regularly Scheduled Life [Paperback]

Ka Mitchell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2009

Sean and Kyle have enjoyed six perfect years of what their friends called a disgustingly happy relationship. But what happens one sunny morning might be more than even the most loving couple can survive. When the bell rings that morning in chemistry teacher Seans first-period class, a terrifying sound fills the hallsgunshots. Sean runs to tackle the shooter, sustaining a bullet wound to his leg. He is unable to save the lives of the principal and two students. Kyle hears about the shooting on the radio, and in the flash of an instant finds his life irrevocably altered. Everythingespecially his hearthangs suspended in a nightmare until he finds out Sean is alive. Kyles just relieved the worst is over. Or is it? Putting that day behind them isnt as simple as it sounds. As Sean struggles to make something positive out of the tragedy, Kyle fights to save their relationship from the dangers of publicityand Seans unwillingness to face how the crisis has changed him.

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Samhain Publishing (June 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1605043079
• ISBN-13: 978-1605043074
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,063,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A solid read, July 8, 2009

By 

Ann Somerville, Professional Irritant "Love, ... (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Regularly Scheduled Life (Kindle Edition)

Mitchell is a good author who writes the kind of stories I like - layered, thoughtful, angsty. And man, the angst in this one comes from all directions - Sean's troublesome recovery from a terrible injury, the effect on the seemingly perfect relationship, dealing with the involuntary outing in the wake of the shooting, and with a threat to his fidelity from a smarmy yet enticing PR, Brandt (aside: what is it with all these characters called Brandt lately?) Kyle and Sean live in an OKHomo bubble, but they also have to interact with a homophobic world, interactions handled in a way which seemed real to me. She gives us lots of meaty interaction, woven together almost perfectly.

It's not perfect - the whole Brandt making moves on Sean seemed a little incredible, though what Brandt wanted to do with Sean outside the bedroom was quite credible. The angry parent subplot didn't work for me at all, and was unnecessary. But the interactions between Sean and Kyle, them and their friends, their family, were very well done, and the way the `perfect' relationship disintegrates is believable and achingly sad. (I do believe I teared up more than once.) There's no easy way out from the mess, and no perfect, all loose ends tied up, closure, but Mitchell manages to make us believe the recovery when it happens, and it's earned.

Characterisations, apart from Brandt, are realistic and attractive, though I question whether an `Italian-Hispanic' family would have children called Kyle, Elise and Nate. The source of the conflict that grows between them derives from Sean and Kyle's different responses to the shooting - Sean's desperate need to bottle it all in, Kyle's desperate need to help his lover to exorcise his anger at not being able to protect him. They're sappy at times, at times when it's believable they would be, and not when it wouldn't be. They sound like guys, mostly - educated men in love. Tony, Sean's friend who becomes Kyle's rock, is also a wonderful character. The story is populated with deftly drawn bit players.

Brandt, as I mention, is the only odd note, but that's partly because he's the toad in the lily pond anyway - big city mores and urges, intruding into Sean and Kyle's once safe, quiet existence. Mitchell doesn't make the mistake of painting him as black-hearted. Brandt is merely venal, and at the end, he's no different than he was at the beginning. He's exactly how he appears - slick, charming, shallow, and ambitious. So it's not so much his characterisation is off, as the author has created a believably unlikeable yet superficially appealing character.

I liked the writing, and I love how physical and emotional pain mirrors each other, the way she uses settings to illustrate the growing estrangement. The pacing is good, and the complex plot never drags. The only bit where it wobbles is to do with the angry parent, but it's a small flaw. The sex is fine, and not overdone. It's there when it needs to be, to illustrate the relationship, and changes in it.

I enjoyed this a lot, and recommend it highly. At 280+ pages, it's a solid read, and an entertaining one. If you're tired of all the 70 page `novels' being churned out, and want to sink your teeth into something long and involving, you'll enjoy this.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Regularly Scheduled Life, February 5, 2009

By 

M. Nix - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Regularly Scheduled Life (Kindle Edition)

After six years together, teacher Sean Farnham and architect Kyle DeRusso are their friends' shining example of the perfect relationship. Then in one day everything changes. Sean is shot while stopping a shooting in progress at his school. At first, Kyle is terrified for his lover's life. Afterward, he's afraid things will never get back to normal.

Being shot thrusts Sean into the spotlight, and he sees an opportunity to do something good. Suddenly public appearances and physical therapy are taking over his life. Will Sean and Kyle be able to return to their regularly scheduled life, or will secrets and publicity tear them apart?

Regularly Scheduled Life is a truly heart-wrenching story that really hit hard for me. Everything about it rang true, from the shooting itself to the emotional fallout. Tough, stubborn, self-reliant Sean is unwilling to let Kyle do things for him and determined to bring hope out of tragedy. I sympathized with him even when I wanted to smack him for hiding his pain from Kyle. Kyle wants to understand what Sean is going through, but at the same time he just wants things to go back to normal. He struggles to hold back his temper and do what Sean needs, even when Sean doesn't want to let him. Kyle made a lot of mistakes too, but he seemed more vulnerable and I just wanted to hug him. The secondary characters--Sean and Kyle's families, their friends Jack and Tony, the publicist, Brandt, and students and families affected by the shooting--are very well done and believable. KA Mitchell did an excellent job of writing about a painful and tragic issue with sensitivity, emotion, and realism. While Regularly Scheduled Life isn't an easy or lighthearted read, I am very glad I read it.

Cassie

Reviewed for Joyfully Reviewed

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Exasperating (spoilers), December 4, 2011

By 

S.T. Ealth - See all my reviews

This review is from: Regularly Scheduled Life (Kindle Edition)

K.A. Mitchell was recommended to me as being "a phenomenal writer of m/m erotica," so what I did expect were at least hot erotic descriptions of sensuality and sex.

I have to say first that I'm quite used to fanfiction slash, both the character pieces, the plotty ones and also PWP: I like them all if well-written. If a story rides in as erotica I expect the physical stuff to be capable of titillating me, or at least to be intriguing to read. I have to state this ahead, so readers understand that the reason why I slate this book isn't any sort of primness.

~~~ spoilers below ~~~

The premise of this story is absolutely great: one partner of a gay couple, a teacher, gets himself shot at a school shooting while overpowering the boy with the gun. Not just that, the guy is also a former jock, he also is still more or less in the closet, as is his partner, and they both are quite well off and in an allegedly functional, great "marriage." People die in the shooting, the teacher is one who survives, with an impaired leg.

This is a brilliant basic story idea, and given a good writer it would have served perfectly to create deep characters, a close look at coming out, at coming to terms with impairment, at how a couple of gay men deal with mental and physical harm and stress, but also at a society that creates hate and self-hate, homophobia and peer pressure capable of provoking such shootings and gay-bashing. That's what I sort of was expecting after reading the accessible blurb.

Unfortunately K.A. Mitchell is so poor a writer, that she not only failed to take up any of the many possibilities this premise threw her way, she managed to keep the characters so shallow, that I was unable to connect with any of them, they all stayed flat and one-dimensional and I was unable to care about them for that reason. She also injected the story with a completely needless amount of IKEA-style sex. In case you wonder, it read about as exciting as an IKEA manual to set up some shelves: nothing was sensual, or erotic, the descriptions were extremely repetitive (which gets really old when within 25 pages you read about 8 different instances of sex) and so formulaic that I was bored to tears after the first 5 chapters and I had to force myself to finish the book.

The plot was equally a dime a dozen and stereotypal. Kyle and Sean came over most times as bitchy, childish juveniles (there wasn't a sliver of maturity to either of them) who never were written deep enough to clarify why they behaved the way they behaved. It was arbitrary - simply because the author decided so and that's the worst you can project about characters. Perhaps most exasperating, apart from the peg-A-into-slot-B-style sex, is how serious topics, like gay-bashing and homophobia, were abused as plot devices without giving them their due. To give an idea of this, Sean outs himself and his partner publicly (to People TV of all things!) without even talking this over with Kyle. Given that Kyle works as an architect/engineer and given the alleged deep love and understanding between the two, this would have to be the nastiest act of underhandedness imaginable.

So, I have a big, a huge problem with the reviews I see here on Amazon, because it really makes me wonder where they come from. They are quite misleading. I've read fanfic which is LIGHTYEARS above and beyond this here! That are stories you get for free and have ready access to on the internet, so anyone who seriously comes to an alleged professional writer for his/her m/m should have read at least a bit of that and have a point against which to grade something neutrally. This is what makes me doubt these reviews here quite a bit.

All said, this book is really something to avoid, it is boring and uninspired.