Review: Randall hit it out of the park again!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 12, 2013
I love this book. Well let's be honest here, I love all of Andrea Randall's books. Usually with a series the first captures you and while the rest are good they kind of wane down on the wow factor as the series goes. Ms. Randall definitely does not apply here. When reading an Andrea Randall novel a few things are a must have.1. Tissues and a lot of them2. A place to discard said tissues, because who wants to be sitting in a mountain of dirty tissues.3. Two bottles of wine. A rich, full flavored wine for the deep parts, and let me tell you they are bottomless pit deep, and a sweeter, lighter wine for the extra good parts.Andrea Randall books are a beautiful, orchestrated waltz danced by mourning and celebration. I've read every book she's published and I've laughed and cried though every single one of them. It will be a serious disservice to the literary world if this woman does not hit the best seller lists.Now, about the book....I was so thankful that Regan got his own story, he was such an interesting character in the first two that I was very glad I got a chance to know more about him.If I could use one quote to describe this book it is the famous Dr. Seuss quote about love:"We’re all a little weird. And life is weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love."Attempting to force his heart and soul to recover from a tragedy that froze him from the inside out, Regan has travelled back to the U.S. to record music with surrogate sister Ember and her boyfriend Bo.Enter beautifully broken Georgia who lives life behind bullet proof glass supported by concrete supported by steel. She never lets herself go and no one gets in.Regan can't take his mind or his eyes off of her from the moment they meet. Both packing some serious emotional damage they operate strictly in the friend zone. There is something chemical between them and it would be so easy to slip into something else but both know that's not possible."There was still too much of Rae swimming in my heart to let my lips confuse someone else."Georgia begins to see the pain in Regan and surprises herself but wanting to help him through it. She's alienated herself and having a friend is what she needs."Even when a wound is raw and exposed, it still needs to be covered in between exposure to dry it out. It was a delicate cycle, one I'd unfortunately become familiar with. Wound care, emotional style."Little by little Georgia lets Regan into her carefully sculpted world of walls. As she helped him with his pain, he is helping her realize her dream of opening a bakery. Regan held fast to his pain allowing it to nearly cripple him. Words unsaid and time lost made it nearly impossible to move on. Slowly he realized it was something he had to do. Would he spend his life looking to his past or at the girl right in front of him?"I drew my pencil across the lines of the notebook, sculpting the last goodbye to Rae, I didn't feel apologetic about that. Rae would want me to love again. Hell, love would want me to love again. I was falling slowly. And I didn't want there to be a bottom, because what greater feeling in the world is there than to actually be falling into love?"Georgia feels charged with protecting Regan from whatever her future holds. She lets him in, but only so much. She trusts him, but does she trust herself? Regan is so different from anything she's ever known and it's terrifying."Why are you such an optimist? At my question he just shrugged and said, "There's no good reason to be anything but." He chose happiness the way people choose to put on clothes in the morning."As the last of Georgia's secrets are exposed, will Regan forgive her for holding back so much or will it be too much for him to have to fight for every little bit of her?Trust me, you do not want to miss out on this beautiful story!I rated Sweet Forty-Two an easy and utterly deserving 5 stars.I have to take a minute to celebrate the writing of Andrea Randall. I discovered her when a friend of hers recommended In The Stillness. I immediately bought it and started reading it. More recently I read the first two in the November Blue series. I usually highlight passages as I go along that I may want to use for a review. However, the entire first part of Ten Days of Perfect was highlight worthy! How does one choose when it is all that good? She is an excellent writer with a superb talent at crafting words into sentences that grab ahold of your heart and force it to stop. An eloquent, master wordsmith comes to mind over and over when reading her novels. I have read and will continue to read each and every book she publishes.