Review: Holden gets his story
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 20, 2013
3.5 starsSave Me From Me is a story of two people who are lost on the roads of their lives. Through the book, they both have a lot of personal issues to sort through before they can really be able to commit to another person. The challenges they face in the book are a direct result of their pasts catching up to them and their initial reactions to events that happen prior to the beginning of the book.Dani is an independent girl who has been making her own choices and living her life as she chooses for the last ten years. The youngest of four siblings, she takes it on herself to solve everyone's problems and feels like if she is not involved everything will fall apart. Returning to her hometown after 10 years, she faces people and situations she thought she had left behind. She is determined not to let anyone in her life down, and feels like her leaving town led to her father's death. Now that she's back, she has to contend with the siblings she doesn't get along with and the ex-boyfriend who has been waiting for her to come back.Holden was introduced briefly in Moving Forward. Having waited too long to tell his best friend he was in love with her, Holden is recovering from a broken heart. Working for his father, he is never in one place long before moving on to the next job site. But he knows this job and life is not what he wants long term, he just hasn't figured out what he wants now that he can't have Jesika.Holden and Dani have chemistry from the very beginning, even though they don't actually speak during their first meeting. And what a meeting it was. I couldn't help laughing out loud while I read that scene, and as far as meetings go, it was epic. But between them are so many obstacles, that at times I wanted to pull out my hair in frustration because I just wanted them to be happy and be together.Overall this was a fairly quick, light read. I really wanted to love this book, but finished just liking it. Everything I had read and heard prior to reading made me excited to get to it on my to-read list. I don't know if it was just that it took a very long time to connect with Dani, but something was missing. It took until almost 60% before I really felt invested in the characters and continuing the story. Until that point my heart just wasn't in the reading. Even after that point I had several points where I wanted to roll my eyes at the speed that several of the conflicts resolved themselves, and actions that felt more plot driven than character driven.Thanks to Erika Ashby for providing me with an arc in exchange for an honest review.