Review: A wonderfully emotionally charged romance between two damaged men (minor spoilers)
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 22, 2012
I really liked this book. It deals heavily in healing two people that have been pretty emotionally damaged and have had a rough life.The way this story is written is quite intriguing. While the whole book is in third person, it's segregated into three parts. First part is from Samuel's POV, second part is from Rey's POV and third part is from both POVs. I've seen this style before and it's a style I'm very fond of. I liked getting to know each character in their own time from both perspectives without the mistakes of head-hopping.Both characters are very fragile emotionally with a ton of baggage. Rey's life has been nothing but one bad thing after another while Samuel is still trying to get over something that happened years ago. Both are traumatized in their own way and they end up getting even more so within the story because their lives start to spiral downhill even more when they meet. It was fascinating to see how these two handled the situations they encountered and how they healed each other without really knowing it while still having to deal with Samuel wanting to be semi in the closet.There were a few things I didn't like about the story, though. Samuel's past is based around his deceased lover, Ben, so there is a lot of detail about him. What I didn't like was how involved he was in the story. Almost everything Samuel did boiled down to Ben, he constantly compared things to Ben, his time with Ben, his love for Ben, how different Rey was from Ben, etc. I grew tiresome of that because I wanted things about Rey and Samuel not about a dead lover and Samuel.I also thought the sex scenes were too long and too clustered together, at least for my tastes. I think the story could have used a bit more editing as well since there was misspelled names and missing words from sentences on more than one occasion. I was also confused a few times because little sentences that alluded to a mysterious person would be mentioned without explaining who that person was. Like, for instance, a Dan was mentioned once but never elaborated; Sky was mentioned but never elaborated (I finally figured out Sky was Schuyler a while after Sky was first mentioned). I was also hoping to get some answers on what Rey would do about getting custody but it's never brought up.In the end, this was a wonderfully emotionally charged romance between two damaged men that I gobbled up. It had its faults but the story was very intriguing and what these two men went through and how they dealt with it, as well as the way they developed their relationship, was something I very much enjoyed.