Review - Primavera by Hayden Thorne

Nineteen-year-old Adam has been having trouble with nightmares. They're so frequent and so bad that the lack of sleep is affecting his work and studies. Adam can't remember many details of the dreams but has the impression he's experiencing memories of an eighteenth-century Italian music teacher named Paolo. What does it all mean?

“Primavera” is an unusual novella. I really had no idea where it was going with the parallel stories of Adam and Paolo. It quickly became clear that there was some kind of connection between the two, but it wasn't obvious how that would play out until the last few chapters.

Chapters alternate between Adam's point of view in contemporary California and Paolo's journal entries from the eighteenth century. The two young men have a lot in common. They are the same age and are both gay. For Adam, that's only an issue for his conservative Catholic parents, but for Paolo, it's something he has to keep carefully hidden or risk ruin, if not death.

Everything gets reconciled rather quickly at the very end. Given the slow pace of the story, I was expecting something a little more subtle.

“Primavera” is available from Smashwords and Amazon (commissionable link).