I don't normally read m/m romance (Heidi's forte and passion). I fell in love with Heidi's fiction when she let me beta her as yet uncontracted fantasy novel The Seventh Veil. I was hooked on Heidi from that moment. While I'm so pleased with the success with her realistic novels, I will always love Heidi's use of fantasy's strengths -- to delve into issues, pulling us into viewpoints that we might not otherwise consider. Hero is one of those novels. Hal Porter is a construction worker from Kansas, living in Los Angeles, and he's far enough into the closet he can see the lamp post. But that's just the beginning of his guardedness. He's the kind of guy you want to wrap in your arms and whisper that it's alright, he can loose the spring inside him, he can let people in. In truth, the people who come into Hal's life have to force their way in like salesmen with their foot in the door. The result in a world that Hal, and we, never imagined. A magical being that is more a place than a person. A place that has a gender (a flexible one, but with a very firm preference for maleness, both for itself and its most private inhabitant.) The metaphors of privacy and invasiveness weave through this novel on many levels. Some of our deepest secrets are open to our loved ones without our even being conscious of the fact, and sometimes our most hurtful acquaintances have not, in the end, left nearly as much scarring as we feared.
