Review - The Taste of Desert Green by Kim Fielding

Zephyr has been on his own since he was a boy. He has learned to rely on himself and nobody else. Although comfortable with his body, he likes to express himself in very feminine ways. When he needs money for food or to pay for a cheap hotel, Zephyr offers his body to men willing to pay for it. That doesn’t always work out well. One day, a trucker, full of self-loathing over what he has done, beats Zephyr up and leaves him by a dumpster in a small desert town.

George runs Fossil Galaxy, a private museum slash tourist attraction in the tiny town of Conrad Junction in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The business is struggling, but as the third generation of his family to run it, George can’t let go. When taking the trash out after closing one night, George finds the barely conscious Zephyr. The young man won’t let him call the police, so George takes Zephyr in and patches him up. Even with the beating, Zephyr is clearly quite good-looking, but George sees more than the young man’s looks. George is the first man who doesn’t seem to want anything from Zephyr, who just helps him because he needs it. It’s an unfamiliar experience for him, and not one Zephyr is prepared to deal with.

Calling “The Taste of Desert Green” an opposites-attract romance would be a bit of an understatement. Zephyr and George come from two very different worlds, or at least they do on the surface. As we get to know them, we see that both have a lot of baggage from their pasts. George’s upbringing within a classic family setting of father, mother, and siblings has left him with issues that are just as serious as Zephyr’s from his life in care.

This is not your typical, very linear, romance. It has its ups and downs as Zephyr comes in and out of George’s life for varying lengths of time. We hear very little about what Zephyr gets up to, except that somewhere along the line he acquires a very rich and entitled “patron” who doesn’t take it well when Zephyr tries to end the arrangement.

Zephyr is a curious character. In many ways, it’s easy to understand how he got to be so stubbornly self-reliant. Many have probably accused the young man of making bad choices, but as Zephyr explains to George at some point, he was simply choosing what seemed to be the best option he had at the time. There isn’t always a “good” choice to make, especially for people that have effectively fallen out of the system.

George is a very classic nerd, but without the extreme introversion. The man does have a significant quirk in the form of synesthesia. He can “taste” colors, which gives meaning to the book’s title. While George also has a strong sense of self-reliance, he has learned the value of friends who help each other out, and he has a lot of them in Conrad Junction.

The Big Dramatic Event at the end wasn’t much of a surprise to me. It was pretty obvious where things were heading with Zephyr’s stalker. It also provides a way out for George from a life that seemed to have him trapped. It’s a very tidy way of getting Zephyr and George where they need to be.

“The Taste of Desert Green” is available from Amazon (commissionable link).