Review: Liked The First Half of the Story
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 22, 2014
I've read and enjoyed each book in this series.  And with each story, I've enjoyed them knowing that I was going to have to let go of some of my own beliefs and common sense to experience a pleasant escape from my every day reality.  And I did, which is why I still go back and re-read the books in this series when I need to get away from real life.  These stories have their value and I appreciate the hard work an author puts into their stories for us to enjoy.My experience in reading Shade's Fall was somewhat disjointed.  I enjoyed the first half of the book in the same way I did the others.  Some of the things the characters said or did were outside of my own personal experience or beliefs, but seemed reasonable for the characters in the story and what they had experienced.  I appreciated the way the author spent time in showing Shade's methods of desensitizing Lilly to many of the triggers that caused her to relive her traumatic feelings and reactions, which remained imprinted in her in spite of her lack of memory.  His patience and understanding in how to approach her seemed reasonable and in line with his trying to build a life with her long-term.  When I got miffed with Shade's over-the-top controlling behavior and Lilly's passive and almost child-like response to it, I reminded myself that in real life people who have been through  physically and sexually traumatic childhoods sometimes need time, experience and a safe environment to continue their emotional development once that trauma has ended and their lives are once again their own to direct.That's how I felt for roughly half to three quarters of the book.  It's with the second half to final quarter of the story that I got knocked out of my happy I-can-accept-all-this-as-escapism feeling.  For me, it totally defied belief and logic that an abused woman of Lilly's young age, especially one whose ingrained beliefs and feelings resulting from her childhood trauma had not really been directly challenged for most of her life, would have made the jump that Lilly's character did in the final few chapters.  Children of abuse, and especially sexual abuse as profound as Lilly had experienced, and who had remained so sexually repressed, would not have then suddenly started being OK with the sexual experimentation that she started engaging in willingly with Shade.  Public nudity, voyeurism and sexual acts within the club, not to mention engaging in "couples" sex would have only been possible after years of desensitization and experimentation in a safe and non-judgmental environment. It takes that long because the mind and body do not easily forget what has been imprinted with pain and degradation. Combine that with the fact that, culturally, from a religious and small-town perspective, Lilly had been raised to find that lifestyle shameful, which compounds the already established shame-based feelings from her childhood abuse, it's highly unlikely that she would have made such a radical change in such an unrealistic timeframe, if at all. (This doesn't even factor in the damage from the physical and emotional abuse enacted by her fanatically religious adoptive parents for years after her primary abuse, which the story does not ever really directly address aside from a few sentences about the church sermon videos.) The over-simplification of how such long-term, complex and layered trauma would be addressed as a part of her relationship with Shade, i.e., after just a few short months, a couple of short breakdowns, a few very controlled frank discussions, was far-fetched and totally unbelievable.  Recovery from abuse, as with any recovery, is progressive and takes a long time.  Not to mention it will always require daily work to maintain that recovery and not have set-backs through triggers and other environmental factors.  I realize that for the sake of the story and it's length, the author could not take years to get Shade and Lilly to that level of open sexuality and personal freedom, but the transition from an emotionally stunted and sexually repressed (not to mention fearful and anxiety-ridden)  religious young woman to someone who not only embraced an open lifestyle, but also the more advanced and atypical BDSM characteristics almost over-night, was in my opinion way too abrupt, which sort of ejected me out of my pleasant reading experience, and for me, caused the story to suffer. Sadly, I wasn't as engaged or invested in the story at the end.  Finally, there were aspects of the story that I found incomplete or without enough supporting information that bothered me:- What did Shade find out from Lilly when he turned out the lights during her hospital stay that helped him understand how to approach her?  That was never tied back in to his strategy with Lily and I didn't get what value it might have had, which left me feeling that it was a worthless point of the story because it had not been tied in to his actions in any meaningful way.- What formed Shade's personality traits of being so controlling and needing the BDSM aspects to feel satisfied in his life (not to mention his somewhat antisocial personality that allowed him to be such a good enforcer and sniper)?  Unless I missed something from this book or the others in the series, I feel like that's a big piece of information that was left out that would have made the story better. Without it, I felt that Shade's character did not come across fully formed and somewhat lacking in depth.- So much emphasis was placed on the impact of the primary childhood abuse that Lilly experienced (and for much of the book couldn't remember), but none of the secondary years of abuse she experienced herself or witnessed her sister experience at the hands of her adoptive parents, was ever really factored in.  I thought that was a huge oversight since Lilly's religious and personal beliefs were formed more directly by those experiences than her previous ones.If I were rating the first half of this story alone, I would have given it 4 stars.  If I were rating the last half of the story alone, I would have given it 2 stars.  A 3 star rating is my compromise.