Review: Unfortunately, Second Chance Romance did not work for me like I had hoped.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 2, 2013
It starts out as a childhood best friends to lovers story, where the couple it torn apart early on without closure. Jules and Noah haven’t seen each other for ten years when fate decides to bring them back into each other’s lives. Jules is working as an exotic dancer putting herself through grad school when Noah comes into her work for his bachelor party. So at this point of the story I was thinking that this was going to be about Noah struggling with his feelings for Jules while also being engaged, but it really isn’t. Immediately Noah is hell bent on getting Jules back and there is really zero back and forth from him, which I liked. He makes up his mind, ends his engagement and is after Jules in the first 20% of the book.This book actually kept me pretty interested for about the first half. I was starting to get a little invested and at one point, I got a little emotional and teared up for some of the horrible things that had happened to Jules. There were also a few parts throughout that really made me laugh. Sometimes things were just freaking hilarious, other times, just plain wrong.“You!” She pointed at me with her skeletal finger. “You do realize it’s a finger and not a wand, right? I’m not going to turn into a rat or anything.” She did it again, so I did it back. “Abracadabra… nope you’re still a bitch.” Noah laughed, but quickly covered it up as a cough.Jackson, Noah’s best friend, was my favorite part. He is very “what you see is what you get” and I thought he was the most redeeming thing about the book.”Fourteen-fifty please.” Jackson handed him a twenty. ”Would you like a bag?” “Nah, she not that ugly.” He teased.…“Why do you think porn sites have a ‘share to Facebook’ button? Who watched porn and thinks ‘you know who would really like this? My family and friends.’ I mean seriously.”I’m all for a good villain in a story and I thought the set up for one was there with Jules mom, which by the way is one of THE WORST mothers I’ve ever encountered,but it isn’t ever fully developed. We get little to no interaction; no background on their relationship other than one incident and just telling us things were bad, but nothing is ever really explained clearly.I kept wondering where this was going, because the relationship between Noah and Jules seemed to be happening so quickly. It felt rushed and there was entirely too much going on. Although I was wondering where it was going, once I realized that it wasn’t really going anywhere meaningful, in my opinion, it was extremely predictable. The twists never felt like twists because I have seen them before and felt them coming. Just about every common twist you can think of was thrown in here at some point. I feel like the author was adding characters to provide conflict and maybe to keep the reader guessing, but it just added to the lack of focus. I wish one or two things had been developed on a deeper level rather than many things, just on the surface.The editing in this book is something I can’t not comment on. I am not a stickler for grammar, punctuation, whatever… and I am by no means an expert or an English major. A majority of what I read is self-published, so I can understand that things may not be perfect and I’m usually totally fine with that. It was just so distracting in this and there were many times I had to reread parts to finally get a clear understanding of what was trying to be said. I noticed this issue mentioned in other reviews and the problem areas were even included in some. I can say that it looks like this was at least a somewhat edited version since I didn’t see all the mistakes that were previously noted in other reviews. There were many missing words, duplicated words in the same sentence, alternating tenses, words with the wrong meanings and things of that sort. The mistakes I noticed were so blatant and obvious that it just makes me wonder how they could possibly have gone unnoticed. *The lack of editing is not what lead me to giving this book the rating that I did, but it definitely didn't help matters.*I really wanted to like this book, it the potential for me to, but by the halfway point things really went downhill fast. The idea of this book I thought was interesting enough for me to want to give it a try, but the execution is what didn’t work for me. The moments of humor unfortunately weren’t enough to make up for the lack of focus and depth in the story.1 1/2 Stars