Review: Disappointing....
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 16, 2012
I wanted to like this one, and tried really, really hard. A widow, several months after her husband's combat death, moves to his hometown in order to fulfill the dream they once shared. It involved a small town, a family home, and a bookstore! It seemed like it couldn't miss. It just didn't work for me, though--so many things just didn't make sense.Alicia, the widow, was all over the place, for one thing. She kept falling into insta-relationships, but then wobbled between feeling extremely close to her new besties and not being sure she could trust them. She was referring to Penny as her best friend very quickly, after only having met her once before--she'd been a close friend of her husband Ty's--but in practically the same thought bubble she'd wonder about Penny's motivations in giving advice. Not that I blame her, because Penny's "advice" seemed to consist mainly of slamming Liam, and insisting that he was bad for Alicia and she should stay far away from him.Alicia's relationship with Liam, her husband's best friend from high school, was similar. At one point VERY early in their relationship, Alicia thought to her herself that it was so nice that Liam LOVED her children. My mental brakes went on right there--he'd spent a little time with Gemma, her daughter, but not nearly enough to label it with the L word yet. And I'm not even sure he'd been in the same room with the baby at that point--at least not while Jason was conscious and not having dinner.Alicia and Liam's constant "we're drawn to each other" juxtaposed with "but we cannot be together; it's wrong" drove me absolutely crazy. It went on way too long to be healthy for them or interesting to the reader. I get the grief and guilt factors, but there needs to come a time where you're either ready, so you move on, or you aren't, so you stop leading a person on and let them go. This all felt very forced, as if the author were trying to create conflict where there wasn't any, or at least make that conflict go on longer than it should have.Speaking of conflict, the entire town drove me crazy. As far as I could tell, the townspeople had very few redeeming qualities. Everyone either told Alicia what a saint and hero her husband had been--nice, in a way, but also painful to a recent widow, especially one who is trying to move on--or what an evil bad boy Liam still was. There was no in between, and their constant need to put their two cents in at all times was annoying.As for the "big secrets" in Ty, Liam, and Penny's past, I found it fairly easy to figure them out early on so the big reveal was pretty darn anticlimactic. Plus, Penny's role in the deception made it even harder for her to have any moral high ground on which to continue her Liam-bashing. In all, it was a frustrating book--doubly so because I really did want to enjoy it.