Review: Could be the start of something promising...
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 14, 2014
Natalie is a college student, majoring in music and living with her best friend Layla. Their relationship is more than your typical BFFs, considering they grew up together and Layla’s parents became Natalie’s guardians after the tragic deaths of her parents in an auto accident. Layla often pushes Natalie outside of her comfort zone, which really isn’t too hard to do considering Natalie still suffers from debilitating panic attacks and nightmares due to her parents deaths. Natalie doesn’t live the life of the carefree college kid…far from it.Ryan “Steele” Hurst is the lead singer of Steele’s Army, an up and coming rock group that has taken the world by storm. As part of a publicity stunt by their manager, they have been roped into playing a gig at a music school in Massachusetts. It is there that Steele sees Natalie sitting in the audience, completely unimpressed with the band’s performance, regardless of how much heart and soul they put into it. It is then that Steele has the idea that he is going to make Natalie change her mind and prove to her that even though she might not like their type of music, it still possesses all of the soul and passion of any other genre. Steele comes up with a plan to take on Natalie as an intern for their summer tour, and chaos ensues.First Chance has the makings of a very good story, however the book as it stands right now is in dire need of an editor. I normally don’t like to deduct stars like this, and I don’t if I have been given an advance copy, but this is one that I paid for and it was released like this. Unfortunately it is rife with spelling and grammatical errors that make it hard to follow from time to time. There are numerous sentence fragments and errors in subject/verb agreement and it is very distracting. I also would have liked to see more depth not only to the storyline, but to the characters as well. This is a novella and it seems there could just be so much more exploration with the storyline.That aside, I do like what the author has done with the characters, especially the character of Liam, I really did like him. Natalie was very hard to like, I have to admit because there were several times I wanted to yell at her to just suck it up, and Steele too, but Liam really sold the book for me. Yes, this book ends on a major cliffhanger, but I read this right before the next book was released so that didn’t bother me as much.Ms. Wood definitely had an interesting story to tell and I realize editors don’t come cheap, however her writing could be so much more polished and easier to read. I’m looking forward to starting right into the next volume of the series, Last Chance.