Review: My review from MustReadBooksOrDie
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 24, 2014
I reviewed this at MustReadBooksOrDie with my friend Shelley!Shel: This novel picks up with Cassie and Josh as husband and wife trying very hard to adopt their biological son and find their footing in their marriage. It's been 6 years and those six years were growing and maturing years...post high school, beginning to figure things out years...so they definitely have some things to work out. They have issues. I mean, if you think about it, of course they do...they're young, trying to reconnect with each other and their son...it's a lot of pressure.Court: Everything is such a whirlwind for them. You pointing out those six years apart, with a lot of bitterness and heartache in between (see book one for those deets!) and here we are. I had high hopes that they would be able to reconnect with one another, but all of the things stressing these two are going to be very hard to overcome.Shel: Cassie seems lost to me. Again, she's young and has had a TON of unfortunate incidents to stunt her search for what she wants out of her life...and so with all of that, she just seemed lost. She's sweet and hardworking and loyal...and lost. She knows she wants her son and she loves Josh--those things she absolutely KNOWS...but how to be a parent to a 5 year old, how to be a wife, how to have a career she loves--those things she has a harder time with.Court: Yikes. Sometimes with how they act, it is hard to remember that they're both only 24. And at the end of the day, sure they've grown up a lot, but they still lack some of the life experience that would mean going through these treacherous waters intact. Heck, that is my age and I know I don't have it all figured out so I would be majorly freaked to have all of my personal life laid bare in the way that hers is. I am 110% on Team Cass for most of this one.Shel: Josh, while a little more directed, also seemed to lose his way at times. He has dreams of being a politician but also wants to be a father and husband and, with the hours he works, he doesn't seem to know how to make all of that work. He pauses often to question how he can juggle all of his desires in a way that will be fair and good to them all.Court: Here is where I started to slip up. Sometimes Josh seemed to be too ambitious. That word is thrown around a lot, and from experience being ambitious in Washington D.C. doesn't usually bode well for the families of those people. An ambitious politician doesn't always do what he should do, so I spent a lot of time worried about whether or not Josh was going to step up!Shel: So we have these two people trying to figure love and career and life out...now throw in a rigorous adoption process and people trying to create problems and you have more issues. In addition, they didn't seem to be connecting to each other very well ...so the entire time I felt incredibly frustrated. I wanted Cassie and Josh to be on the same page MORE, wanted more intimate moments, MORE details at the end, more connection...don't get me wrong, the ending isn't cliffy...it just felt like (for me), it needed more story about how they managed to get where they got. After all of their struggle, I wanted to live in the story of how they came together and feel the warmth of that more. It was definitely very real in the way the characters voiced frustrations and fears and struggles--I'm betting any 20-somethings in their shoes would feel a lot like Cassie and Josh. I just wanted a smidge more of the reward after working with them through their struggles.Court: I completely agree. Their story becomes resolved, but I felt there was something missing in their connection that we felt in the first book. Maybe it was because a lot of the scenes in the first book were in the past when we knew they were in love. Now they (and us along with them) are not sure of that fact, so it is hard to get from point a to point b for me as well in the time frame that this story is set. The ending felt a little bit too rushed, to the point where I was having whiplash by the changing of thought processes going on in the epilogue. That was very disjointed and had me confused. After such great love for the first book I think the expectations in my head clouded my enjoyment of this one.Shelley: 2 StarsCourtney: 2 stars