Review: My Kind of read!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 16, 2013
My kind of read! The traumatic journey the characters had to endure to earn their HEA tugged at my heartstrings.What I liked.The conflict. The turmoil. The continued pursuit of happiness and as a reader rooting for them to get it. I love reading books with lots of emotion and this book had the events that made it emotional.The hero. He was kind, lovable, likable, tough, lived by his own rules and didn't care what others thought. Defended the weak.The heroine. She was sweet and innocent but what she had to endure and overcome changed her to a strong individual. She learned lessons the hard way and never once thought about giving up or complained.What I didn't like.The head-hopping. Mostly from the secondary characters. I didn't think there was a need to have scenes from the secondary characters. A simple "grandma frowned" could have replaced several paragraphs that were unnecessary.Not enough character reaction when a dilemma was presented to them. This was my biggest issue with the book and why I took off a star. All the other reasons for not liking it were minor. I would have loved to have seen the characters struggling with their decisions, to think about the consequences, to know what the stakes would be if they chose the easy way or the right way. I wanted a deeper connection. Ms. Ingram told me their feelings, their emotions, instead of showing them to me. In one particular incident - a very heartbreaking one - the heroine "was shocked and vomited. She never felt so alone and scared." She didn't think about what it meant or what she was going to do. How her life would change. What her future held. She thought about retribution, but didn't follow through and never thought about it again. It wasn't realistic. It was a life-altering event for everyone around her not just the heroine. This one and a few other reactions could have been more emotional. I wanted to feel with the character. To be in her head. To cry with her. Merely stating the feeling robbed me of that. It was like watching a great movie with the sound off. I felt cheated.It started with a prologue. *groan* Normally I despise prologues unless you grip me. This one did not. Nothing important happened. I didn't care about the characters. It wasn't until I was well into the book that I realized that the prologue was a pivotal moment in the story and I knew it was coming up and waited for it. But when it did, I had to go reread it again because it meant more if it was where it was meant to be in the story.Overall, it was a really good read, just not great. But it definitely had the potential for it.