Review: An original and refreshing story with snarky, sarcastic dialogue.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 18, 2014
The Fall of January Cooper was a completely unexpected surprise for me. Picking up a book by an author you've never read before is a real toss up. You never really know what you're going to get. Well, what I got, I LOVED. Audrey Bell writes exactly the way I love my books to be written. Smart. Clever. Witty. Unpredictable. Real. This book is funny. I don't know if it was supposed to be funny, but it is. The writing is sarcastic and snarky and so full of humor, I laughed out loud more times than I could count. The characters are just so real, their dialogue so authentic. This story is original, refreshing... perfect. While the blurb is just vague enough to allow a reader to assume this story could potentially be cliché, it's anything but. You've never heard this story before.January Cooper is a child of privilege. She's a spoiled, self-absorbed Harvard student whose biggest worry is what designer shoes to wear on any given day. But the author nailed the development of this character. Reading the story through January's point of view, I, as the reader, didn't know how self-absorbed she actually was. The author crafted this story in such a way that I could never really decide if she was actually a self-centered brat, or if she was actually just very right about all of the crappy people she constantly talked crap about behind their back. January is obviously wealthy and spoiled and of the mindset that she  has been the perpetual victim of a crappy family, crappy boyfriends, crappy friends. But is she? Or is she just so wrapped up in herself that she fails to see things as they really are? Maybe a little of both. Maybe a lot of both.I loved Christian Cutlass. He's no-nonsense. No crap. Every word out of his mouth, I just wanted to devour. He's the perfect male hero because he's just so darn real. He doesn't say all the right things, do all the right things. He's real enough to make mistakes, enough mistakes to tick off the reader and add a decent amount of angst to this story, which I love. He's just a genuine guy, trying to navigate through a really crappy course of events that have altered his life forever. And when his broken world collides with January's collapsing one, it isn't all cliché rainbows and sunshine. Together, their dynamic is just perfect. Perfectly imperfect, really, as they fight each other, fight themselves, all the while developing an unlikely friendship and an even greater understanding of each other amidst their growing attraction.This story is told in alternating first person points of view... my favorite kind of thing. I love getting inside the heads of these characters, knowing exactly who they are even though the other character has no idea. Their inner monologue is just as witty and humorous as their dialogue. My only criticism of this story is how rushed some scenes felt to me. It wasn't a significant rush, but just enough to leave me wanting more detail, stopping briefly to reread a few sentences to try to figure out what I just missed. But never enough to remove me from the storyline... which was consistently well paced. This is an extremely well written story of love, loss, and self discovery. It's a beautiful story of unearthing who you really are after you've lost everything that once defined you.