Review: A confusing pursuit
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 10 20, 2013
My best guess is that the author's heart is really in book two of the series (The Pursuit of Passion (Pursuit, #2)) because this book is all over the place.  I am going to discuss the plot in depth in this review, including some details of what happens later in the book -- you may want to avoid this if spoilers are a concern.The story is told from the POVs of Pat, a young wannabe singer, and Adam, a young college student.  Adam sees Pat and immediately falls for her, but Pat is already in love with Zach.  Adam doesn't care that Pat's heart is elsewhere and he aggressively tries to make her his own, using his picture-perfect family to help draw her into his world.  Pat is a difficult character to understand.  She wants to be a singer, but we never really get a picture of much this means to her or what her working process is like.  We're told that she loves Zach, but the focus is on the sexual side of their relationship.  She relates her struggles with an eating disorder, but I am not even sure what she looks like.  Is she a bigger girl or not?  At one point in the book, we're told that she lost thirty pounds -- so is she now too thin or did she have thirty pounds to lose?As soon as you feel the love story between Pat and Adam is coming into focus, the rug is pulled out from under us and we're propelled years into the future.  Pat is now a totally different person.  The author explains why she changed, but I personally found the explanation of why she became totally evil to be completely unsatisfactory.  And a new female character, who will presumably be the focus of the second book, is introduced.Taylor seems to be the opposite of Pat.  She's meek; Pat is driven.  She's virginal; Pat is sexual.  She has a perfect body; Pat can grab handfuls of her hips.  Guess which one is perfect for Adam?The last three chapters take place over a nine-year span, so it's a very jumpy and disorienting ending.  It appears that the second book takes place between the penultimate and last chapter, so reading this book will spoil you for the second book in the series as well.  The ultimate factor that kept me from enjoying this book was how Pat was characterized and how creepy I found Adam by the end.  While he started out as a relatively normal man, by the end of the book, he was majorly creeping me out.  At one point, he rescues Taylor from a guy who is trying to rape her and when he later imagines her having (consensual) sex with her loving boyfriend, he tells us that he finds the thought as upsetting as her being raped.  Yeah, that's not selfish at all.He just threw Pat away when he found a hotter girl.  He didn't know anything about Taylor, it was just a lust-at-first-sight situation.  And when Pat reached out to him, he treated her like garbage.  I can't help but feel it reflects how the author feels about Pat.  Pat is just too sexual, too career focused, too human, for the author to think she is a good match for her "perfect" creation.Other than the icky gender politics going on here, there are some minor factual issues with the book (UCLA isn't an ivy league college) and the sex scenes are written like prison erotica.  Even when love is supposedly motivating the characters, the scenes are blunt genital-on-genital action with no finesse.