Review: Awful! Fell Flat and Extremely One-Dimensional
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 04 19, 2013
Who are these other readers that gave this book glowing reviews?! What other books have you guys been reading?!I really had to force myself to finish this book. I wanted so badly to stop reading at 40% through and then again at 88% through, which is not normal for me. I give authors the benefit of the doubt and genuinely feel bad when I dislike their work. I usually push myself if I'm a bit unsatisfied with a book, hoping that it will redeem itself in the second half, but this one started out weak and just got weaker and weaker. I thought that maybe I just needed to give it more of a chance and the characters would get stronger, but nope, after I finally finished it I wanted to smack myself for being the idiot that bought this book.Amy was passive to the extreme and teenager-like in how she reacted to and with the other characters. The girl just didn't have a backbone. I kept waiting for her to find her voice and stand up to Hunter or even her mother, but good God, she was just so weak! I have no problem with a character starting out a bit weak and unsure of themselves and then growing into their own and becoming stronger as the story moves along. That didn't happen here and I kept wanting to smack Amy! Her character was just boring and incipient; stuck in her own head for the majority of the book and such a "woe is me" type. She was dependent on the men in the book for her own happiness. Where were the strong females or at least ones who had more of a voice? Even her friends didn't seem to help her grow a pair. What Ryan supposedly saw in her was beyond me, especially when she was kissing Hunter and entertaining thoughts of him while she was technically dating Ryan!Hunter was manipulative and so not worth her agonizing over, which was another reason why I really disliked Amy. She was so stuck in high school; I mean, c'mon, you're 23 year old, get the hell over it! How in the world she even contemplated anything again with this guy... I have no idea. Even without seeing him through Ryan's eyes you could tell the guy was off. And justifying her decision to give him another chance by saying he's proven himself to be more mature, when he really hadn't and her interactions with him were minimal, was absolutely ridiculous!And while I actually liked Ryan, I just didn't feel like his character's traits fit with his dialogue or how the author was writing him. He didn't sound like this ruthless businessman and he sure as heck didn't sound British! The fact that Ryan dropped his partnership with her mother simply for Amy's sake without her even offering to try and make it work really showed me how she just expected him to give and give and she just took. There was no compromise whatsoever on her end.The characters were really one-dimensional. There was a lot of telling, rather than showing, and I felt like I was outside the story and just listening to someone recount it. The dialogue between characters was minimal and didn't feel real, but rather very stiff and actually kind of boring. The sex scenes were definitely lacking; there was no chemistry or steam between the characters. And where the heck in the book do they decide they love the each other? I never got a sense that they spent enough time together or had that intense of interactions to warrant that. On top of all that there were numerous errors throughout the book. While I can forgive one here or there from self-published authors, it's just bad marketing and representation of your abilities when you have that many errors.My advice, avoid this book! Granted, it's a cheap one, but it's honestly not even worth that much.