Review: Didn't deliver for me...
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 27, 2014
I really wanted to love this book. It had such a great premise. Katrina hires a washed up rock star to play at her daughters library without knowing who he is. I liked the idea that both Katrina and Adrian were a bit older . I hoped that meant they would avoid some of the angsty behaviour young love can entail.  It didn’t take me long to realise this was going to be an emotional book. I was ten minutes in and I felt like crying and that was before these guys actually met!Katrina is left a widow at a young age. She retreats to her home town just outside of New York to raise her young daughter. Quite a lot of the book deals with flash backs and thoughts to her marriage. So much so, I got the feeling no relationship could ever match the idealised one she had shared with her husband.  She meets Adrian who she is attracted to and he shares her love of music.  Both of these guys have major issues that make have a relationship a minefield. He isn’t being honest about who he is and she isn’t being honest about her feelings for her late husband.Of course it all comes tumbling out in the end. By that stage I didn’t really care. By half way through I had started skipping pages to get through the emotional quagmire of these two moving the relationship forward. And no I wasn’t just skipping the saucy bits (there wasn’t too many of those either). The book is completely from Katrina’s point of view so you don’t see Adrian getting that invested in the relationship. In fact although he discusses his past with Katrina you get very little sense of his current life. I often didn’t understand his motivations or actions.  Also I didn’t always like the way he treated Katrina, it often felt like he was keeping her separate  from his ‘real’ life.I suppose I just couldn’t connect with these two. While in some ways this was a quite emotional book I didn’t feel the emotion between these two grow. All in all it just fell a bit flat. From what I can find this is Jessica Topper’s first book. Perhaps that’s why I got the feeling there was a lot of  unnecessary detail to wade through . For a book about a rock star romance, “Louder Than Love” didn’t seem to have a lot of star power for me.