It started late at night, after I’d finished a pretty decent NA con rom called Stupid Girl (see last week’s post). I needed something to read, even if it was just a bridge book until the next really great one came out. I saw the cover for this one, and though I’m not usually a cover geek, it did catch my eye. I found the blurb a little confusing, but hey, I was young and I needed the money. Oh, no, wait, wrong justification. It was late and I needed a read.
It was a little slow at first and just a tad confusing. But pretty soon I caught onto the drift of the story line: girl runs into old college boyfriend, he’s married but there’re still sparks. . .we all know where this is going, and since it’s con rom, I could be fairly certain that there had to be something up with the ex-boyfriend’s wife or with their marriage. I wasn’t wrong on either count.
The plot of this book isn’t bad. It’s interesting, and it’s not trite. The characters are fairly well-developed, or at least the main ones are. A few seem to float in and out of the story like seaweed on the ocean.
It’s the execution of the story that left me a little less than satisfied. There are multiple flashbacks, and they go back to different places. The story takes place in present-day, five years ago, six years ago. . .like a confused time-traveler,I was constantly having to determine where and when I was. There are two key past events that influence the present, and those are slowly revealed.
I would’ve been okay with the flashbacks. I even could’ve dealt with the dual POV in both present and flashback. But then we jumped into the POV of another important but as yet unexplored character–just for one short chapter–and I was left even more confused.
And then. . .it ended. Mid-emotion, mid-plot thread, mid-climax. . .it just ended. I might’ve thought a page had been left off if there hadn’t ben an announcement about the next book.
Will I read book 2? Probably, eventually. I’d love it if the author could pull all these threads together and redeem the first book through the second. If you enjoy angsty reads, you’ll like The Way We Fall by Cassia Leo. Maybe wait for book 2 to come out.
Between Colleen Hoover’s Never Never and this one, I’m experiencing a long case of bookus interruptus. And I don’t love it.
