Review: Honest review given
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 13, 2014
Broken by M. L. YoungThis is a sweet story with a lot of potential, but I'm sorry to say it fell flat for me in several areas.The book features a young 19 year old girl, Bailey, and a handsome and mysterious fighter named Kyle. Bailey's mother abandoned her and her father when she was 5 years old. We never learned why. This tore up her father, sending him into the land of alcoholism. Growing up was not a happy time for Bailey. Her father never abused her, but he did tend to neglect her while he was drinking and passing out on the sofa.Bailey manages to get into college in her small Illinois town, but on the spur of the moment decides to chuck it all and go stay with her friend in Chicago. It's here she meets Kyle. He is a devastatingly handsome fighter who has never lost a match. He has a reputation of being an enigma, a ghost who never stays around after his matches. He shows up, wins, and then quietly leaves.But Bailey runs into him at a local coffee shop and they begin a tentative relationship. You see Bailey has intimacy issues because of a horrible thing that happened to her several years ago. I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say it involved an old boyfriend, who unexpectedly shows up in Chicago and begins stalking her.I liked Bailey, and felt bad for what happened to her, but she did seem to me to be very immature. She was seeing Kyle regularly for weeks, but still did not consider herself to be his girlfriend because he had not asked her to be. Kyle finally took her to a nice restaurant and formally asked her to be his girlfriend, almost like a marriage proposal. It just felt weird to me, as if it was not official until he asked her.Later they do a pinky swear about something, which seemed more than a bit juvenile to me. Although they kiss and cuddle, they do not get seriously intimate until the very end of the book. I felt bad for Kyle. He must have had a very bad case of blue balls by then.When they finally do decide to get it on, they plan it out two weeks in advance. It was not spontaneous in any way and felt very sterile because of that. I wanted to like this book more than I did. I think it has a great premise, but unfortunately it was just unable to live up to it.