Review: I struggle for words...but I'll try.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 7, 2011
Okay, so I'm apparently the first jerk to give this anything but five stars, but there are just some things I wish someone had told me. For starters, I almost didn't get through the book. The first quarter of the book was so damn saccharin it could have given me cancer! MEN DO NOT TALK LIKE THAT, EVEN GAY ONES! It was almost as though the author felt the need to explore every gay stereotype out there, from men running around calling each other Darling and Sweetheart to talking about home decorating and mango margarita's. I'm sorry; but thank god the kid was kidnapped because I couldn't take one more sugary gay word!Anyway, I soldiered on and I'm glad I did. While there were some things that felt like plot or story holes, I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief and go with Christian and Lucca on their journey of torture, degradation, self-flagellation, personal discovery, and ultimately hope. About halfway to three-quarters of the way in I understood why the characters were so over-the-top sweet in the beginning; it was to make up for the 180 each character goes through after Christian is kidnapped and "rescued". I felt the post-traumatic events were far more true to life and that served to make them more heartbreaking - the honesty of it. Each character: Christian, Lucca and Christian's parents each have to examine their lives before the incident and after it only to discover that in some ways they have lived a lie and their overblown happiness was nothing more that a facade. Everybody lies. No one is 100 percent happy and everyone keeps secrets to protect the people they love from that unalienable fact. What matters is that if you really love someone, you take the sweet with the sour and beautiful with the horribly ugly.So in the end, this book is: too sweet, equally brutal, heartbreakingly honest, and ultimately uplifting. Just like life. Definitely worth the read.