Review: Reliably good but not amazing
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 21, 2014
3.5 starsAs a huge fan of Cara McKenna's  After Hours, I was a little disappointed in this latest offering. Partly perhaps this is just personal preference - I don't generally enjoy epistolary novels and this was clearly going to be in this vein. But I also didn't find the letters very effective in conveying a real and genuine relationship with real feelings. As a result Eric didn't really become real to me until he spoke in person and was released from prison; before that he was just a cipher (and not a very articulate one - I understand he is supposed to have difficulty writing but it made me feel as though he and Annie were mismatched, and in the letters he came across almost childlike at times). A lot of the beginning of the book is devoted to descriptions of Annie's intense awareness of and attraction to Eric but I found it a bit hollow without any meaningful interaction between them.The main conflict of the book is that Eric has done this Very Bad Thing which he was imprisoned for and yet he can't tell Annie exactly what happened to make him do it, although we are assured it was justified. For me personally, that left me very unsatisfied. Others may enjoy the notion that Annie has to trust and fall in love with Eric while accepting and not understanding this huge incident, but I couldn't get past it. It was especially difficult as we don't feel that Eric has really changed or developed much as a character, although he claims he is much more level headed these days. We never actually see any of that, just take his word. Annie repeatedly tries to get his assurance that he would never do such a thing again, and we're led to believe that he places this value on violent revenge because it's all he thinks he has to offer, and that it was just the way things were in the world he lived in. Unfortunately none of that is redeemed at the end of the book. He still says he would exact revenge on people who hurt those he loves, even while Annie says that she wouldn't want him to, that it would be more important to her to have him with her. To me this just made Eric seem incredibly arrogant, selfish, and condescending and demonstrated that the revenge he was obsessed with wasn't anything to do with Annie, but all about his own weird ideas of justice. Not very romantic at all.To McKenna's credit Eric is not unlikeable - you do come to believe in Eric as a basically good person; and I like the idea of Annie struggling to reconcile her feelings for a man who has done something objectively bad. For me, it doesn't quite get off the ground, but perhaps that's just my subjective response.As always there is a lot that McKenna does well; the character of Annie is believable and likeable, as are her family. She paints a very good picture of the world the book exists in, including the sad declining town of Darren. The sex scenes are realistic and erotic (although many are letters or phone sex so not my cup of tea). You are invested in the characters and want good things for them. But it doesn't have the same kind of spark and realism as After Hours. Every time Annie made a passing reference to Larkhaven I just wanted the story to go there instead.If you like Cara McKenna you'll probably enjoy this enough to make it worth the purchase, and if the problems I had with it don't bother you then you'll probably love it. McKenna really is a great writer, head and shoulders above 99.99% of romance/erotica authors out there. This one just wasn't my favourite.