A review by erickabdz
Running with Lions by Julian Winters

3.0

Why do people let things so precious to them turn into dark, unbearable secrets?

This was the cute, cheesy read I expected! I was kind of hoping for a lot more depth, but unfortunately this didn't do it for me. The first half of the book was very confusing for me; both because the strange use of the third person narrator and because, even being mostly character driven, I had lots of trouble identifying the characters. But after I got the hang of it, Running With Lions turned out to be an adorable story with some meaningful messages, even if not new; but honestly, I could read a thousand times the story of discovering and accepting your sexuality. Handled correctly, it's always an important topic.

Another thing I didn't like was the lack of football. Not cool, friends! Like, it DOES have some football on it, but it specially focuses on teamwork in general. That's cool, I guess, but I was expecting more things on the sport? Also, where are all my girls? This needed more girls, definitely, because with the lack of them everything that Gray did had to be judged as the 99.9% of the female representation and... not good.

The secondary characters were cute and nice, I think, but Emir was the only one that shone in the story! Even as Sebastian as our protagonist, Emir was the only one with a distinct voice in the story. I loved his humor so much.

Overall, a cute story to kill time!

He’s tired of trying to be this amazing version of a guy that everyone else sees but Sebastian can’t find when he stares in the mirror.