Review: Some disconnect for me
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 11, 2013
Now as I get here and see so many 5 star ratings I feel crappy to be honest. I hope I am wrong with my review.Love Lost begins with a tough upbringing. The main character Rayna Brimm is in a home that is broken and she has never had a role model. Being a New Yorker, I know the scene and the surrounding areas. For someone to make it out of the projects without help is not really common and I will almost say rare. The beginning of the book is filled with a lot of street talk, but it is, I kept telling myself part of the history of Rayna.How Rayna and her family are scattered is a somewhat difficult tale. I couldn't connect with a girl embroiled in this life and completely surrounded by drugs and chaos. She is with a boy who is a low level trouble maker. He cheats, lies, does and sells drugs. Some how, this is what was hard to swallow, Rayna rises above. I guess she studied while her crack head Mom was scoring and she had nothing else to do. A short while her grand parents were talked about but it seems they could care less about Rayna.She ends up (no spoilers) in North Carolina going to college. This was the dis connect for me. I could see, relating to my own east coast area, a kid in Washington Heights growing up and maybe going to a state college to try to rise above. I for one have been in California for a few years and I will never get the Brooklyn out of me. I talk and act exactly the same even with higher education. I could be wrong but you don't de-ghetto in a week. The references to fashion and a type of shoe was baffling to me. My only thought was a story many years ago I read about Oprah Winfrey. She said once she made it and had a segment on the news that she was going to buy good sheets and towels. This was something she dreamed of a, nice 1000 count Egyptian cotton sheet set. She talked about luxury bath towels and that story always stuck with me. Even as I watched Oprah grow, I saw her constantly talk about money. She always told people that Bill Cosby told her to always sign your checks and keep a value in your head. So, for Rayna blowing money on Louis Vuitton anything was a hairball in my throat. I hope what I wrote here makes sense.She gets a room mate and best friend who is upper middle class. I mean Rayna had to be really "rough around the edges" and it was unspoken how she was accepted. I think maybe if people talked about her slang and made reference that she was lacking class I could have felt better. So her room mate goes home to California and Rayna is in tow and gets a job with the family business. She works towards her therapy degree and wants to focus on sports related therapy. Enter Azmir Jacobs, a man who was into Rayna. I guess he also had a similar background. Again no spoilers. Azmir and Rayna together or getting together was the love story.I won't say I hated the book. I just had a few issues and would never post a review like this. I was asked to read book 2 and see if it gave me some closure and some answers. I will read book 2 and I hope I get that. A story of love's redemption... something to think about.