Review: Lovely and Beautiful. A Nice Afternoon Read.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 22, 2014
*Written for Craves the Angst Book Reviews*The Review:This was a beautiful, heartfelt read. Destiny Burnside or Des for short was a great heroine who was selfless and kind and really cared about the people around her. She took care of her family, most of the time at her own expense, and she fell in love, wishing and wanting to truly live her life with no regrets or passions unfulfilled. When she officially meets Hefin after weeks of eyeing him at the local library where she's searching the help wanted ads and he's restoring parts of the library, she falls freely into love, knowing their time together will be short with a sorrowful ending, but she chooses to bravely move forward despite that.Hefin is a wonderful hero. After a failed marriage that's left him with a truck load of guilt, he doesn't want to hurt Des, knowing he's leaving soon. But like she has, he's been eyeing her for weeks, admiring the strong, chin-up female who takes her circumstances in stride. Hefin is a bit complicated but I loved the way he supported Des and thought about her.These two have to go through an emotional journey to get to the end and it's sometimes fun, sometimes painful but always worth it because they aren't leaving "what-if's" to chance.But...I loved the story and I really liked the characters. The reason for only three stars is there was a ton of inner monologue. Some scenes were so riddled with it I actually found myself skipping over paragraphs a few times just to get to the meat of the scene. The author would take us out of the present scene with loads of background information, sometimes having an entire page of it during a conversation between characters. It was a bit frustrating because I kept being pulled from emotional or playful moments to be given unrelated information or memories from the past. It was circumstances like those that left me wishing for less character thought.The Wrap Up:Great story and great characters. My copy needed some serious editing but it was an unedited copy so its understandable. I do wish there had been less monologue but overall, I enjoyed this beautiful story of two people who find love despite a difficult situation.NOTE: Live is book one in the Burnside series and is an Adult Contemporary Romance written by Mary Ann Rivers. A gifted copy was provided by the author via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review through Tasty Book Tours .