Review: Overall Rating: 4.5 stars- Kept telling myself “just one more chapter.”
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 19, 2014
This read was a recommendation from one of our readers (thanks Charlena!) She asked if we’d read any of AE Murphy’s work and I said no. Off to Goodreads I went. As I was doing some checking, I realized Broken was free (still free!) on Amazon and immediately one-clicked it. Free read recommended by one of our people? I’m in.When I started reading, I just wasn’t sure. Everything seemed to be happening at breakneck speeds. There were some grammar and punctuation problems (beyond just being written by a British author.) But there was also this sense of foreshadowing. I knew something was coming. I just didn’t know what.And then it came.Holy crud, did it come. And I was hooked.Overall Rating: 4.5 stars- Kept telling myself “just one more chapter.”If there’s one thing you should know about me it’s that I *hate* spoilers. Hate hate hate. Do not hint at things in a book I’m reading or a movie I’m watching. Do not take away the suspense, the mystery, the shock when it happens. I live for that. But for the first time in my adult life, I Googled for spoilers. I couldn’t help it. It was 3am, the bottom had just dropped out of Gwen’s life and I HAD to go to bed. But I needed to know.Fortunately, Google let me down. I couldn’t find any spoilers and I was forced to continue to read the book the next day and find out for myself what was coming. It was pure, unadulterated, awful, horrible, delicious torture.I think this is the best kind of New Adult book. Yes, there is some smut. It’s actually early in the book and then Gwen has a very long dry spell. But that’s not what the book is about. It’s about love and healing and redemption and forgiveness and living with your own flaws and someone else’s. It’s about the most painful kind of secrets. It hurt me. My heart hurt as I read.I waffled back and forth about Nathan. Did I hate him? Did I love him? What is his deal? Why is he such a prick? Oh, I forgive him for being such a prick. Usually I hate the back and forth of a relationship but our characters are so, well…. Broken…. That it felt authentic. Of course they were conflicted. Of course they were tortured. We learn all about why as the book goes on."You're not arguing with me, I thought for sure I'd have a Guinevere induced migraine by now."The book is not without flaw. There are a lot of punctuation errors, a fair number of grammatical errors. There are multiple major continuity errors. Enough that I had to flip back a page and think “eh?” Normally those are things that would knock a book down at least a full point for me. And this was severe enough that it did. But wait, I gave it 4.5 stars? Yeah. That’s because I’d give this 5.5 stars for story."I'll always worry about you."Even when our characters aren’t very likable (and believe me, that happens a lot. Gwen can be exceptionally whiny sometimes and Nathan is a downright jerk sometimes.) I still CARE about them so much. I want to know what it going on. I need them to be okay.Of course, we don’t really get “okay” at the end of this book. It’s a cliffhanger. It’s a cliffhanger with an epilogue that made me want to hit things. It was so intense, I actually gasped. What? Why? How? What is going on?I don’t normally read books by the same author back-to-back but there was just no way I wasn’t going to read the sequel next. I started it only a few hours later. That review is coming. But for now, do yourself a favor. Tell yourself to overlook the grammar and continuity problems and one click this amazing freebie. It’s not a light read by any (ANY!) stretch of the imagination, but it’s an awesome read."She's seen it, she's heard it and she knows it so she must die with it."Smut Factor: 3 stars- Not BadCharacter likability: 4 stars- I wish we were friends.Storytelling: 5 stars (um? 6?) I wake up thinking this really happened.Writing and editing quality: 3 stars- A few errors, but nothing that took away from the story.