Review: Okay Revenge Story
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 23, 2013
I had fairly high hopes for this book. The blurb made it sound interesting, and who doesn't like a good revenge story, after all? There was some good and no actual bad to this story. It just didn't have quite the oomph I expected, given the blurb.Emily starts out as a relatively strong (albeit somewhat unbelievable - more on that in a minute) character. She gets an internship at Daniel Hartmann's company with the intention of making him pay for sending her dad to jail many years earlier, and pretty much destroying her family's fortune. I can get into that. However, as even Emily admits, the plan wasn't a particularly strong one. After all, how's she going to destroy his company from within...as a new hire...in the marketing department.One issue I had with Emily herself that I had were her wishy-washy attitude toward Daniel himself. She'd admittedly been fascinated/a little obsessed with him since childhood (he's 13 years older than her, which almost puts him in squicky old territory for me). Then as soon as she meets him, she gets lust for him and almost immediately starts sleeping with him (there are a couple of dates before then). I could see if she were trying to lure him to his doom, a-la-Siren fashion, but that didn't seem to be the reason. I also don't get where she got all her money to spend. She's an entry-level marketing assistant. Yet she drops money at every opportunity buying high fashion, etc. I thought her family was broke. She's 21. I don't get it.I did like the fact that she'd put a time limit, more or less, on her revenge plans since she had an art fellowship come autumn that she intended to go to. And she did go as planned, though things (naturally) didn't go quite as she intended on that end. Clearly this revenge wasn't the be all and end all of her existence, and given what she believed on Daniel, it easily could have been. Kudos to Ms. Darby for not making Emily solely revenge-oriented. That can often be overdone and it wasn't in this case.It was much harder to get a read on Daniel, given the book was first-person POV with Emily. So much of the book was just ... meh. Daniel, other than being quite bossy and arrogant about her coming when called/texted (and she did), wasn't a big alphahole, which was nice. But I never really got a feeling for him as a person, just a (given Emily's profession) lump of clay moved around as necessary.So, overall, the book was okay, but not spectacular for me. I wish there'd been more drama and actual revenge-getting moments than what we got, along with avoiding the oh-so-typical cliche moment (not going to spoil it, but there was an eye-roll moment after Daniel and Emily broke up at one point where she makes a particular discovery).I liked Ms. Darby's writing and I'm sure I'll pick up another book by her in the future. This one just gets a 3-star rating from me, unfortunately.Book provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.