Review: Sports + romance + real life = Red Card
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 26, 2013
*Book provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review.Originally posted on <a href="http://adriasromancereviews.blogspot.com">Adria's Romance Reviews</a>I've never had to work so hard to write a spoiler free review!Red Card is just classic Liz Crowe. Emotionally engaging, jealousy, anger, and bitterness war against love, forgiveness and passion and in true Liz fashion, it's anyone's guess as to which emotion will win out at the end of the book. What makes this book so addictive is not so much the characters but their stories. As a reader I relate to them in all their flawed glory and every mistake they make, even when I want to strangle them, makes them more "touchable" as characters.Metin is a mess throughout most of the book. He's another one of those real life men that just doesn't know how to handle the good things that come his way. Though he can be an epic pain in the ass sometimes, I felt for this man and his demons, they were powerful vices he was battling and like in real life, that battle will continue for the rest of his life. What made him admirable is his unwillingness to give up. Metin isn't the "roll over and die" type. He might sink to untold depths of despair but he's not about to let any one get the best of him.Mel was a little harder for me to relate to, she was just such a hard ass sometimes that I wanted to shout "Woman, where's your humanity?!" Of course, after I first had that thought I realized that she and I had more in common than I'd like to admit and stopped putting together the "I hate Mel" signs. She shuts herself down and absorbs negativity like a sponge, lashing out at any one with whom she doesn't see eye to eye with. She definitely sabotages her chances at happiness and strikes fear into the heart of her own father with her stubborn attitude and quick temper. She has a big mouth and an even badder attitude that, while I can't claim to love, I did understand.Liz's stories don't begin, develop and end in a few days, the conflicts sometimes take years to solve and even while the characters are working out their main conflicts, like in life, a few more always pop up along the way. Red Card is takes place over a time period of a few years, to allow the characters to screw up, deny it, throw tantrums over their screw ups, grow up, screw up again and eventually patch things up. I love how Red Card, much like all of Liz's books, doesn't rush through the conflicts or try and sugar coat them. Basically? They're front and center forcing the characters and the reader to acknowledge them and deal with them.All of Liz Crowe's books are sexually charged, with the characters comfortable and bold in their sexuality and their needs. Red Card's sex scenes are definitely not for the faint of heart. They're hot, sweaty, dirty and oh so erotic.One thing I had trouble with? The sports lingo. I'm not a sports fan at all so I don't know anything about soccer, much less the terminology used to describe the game. However, it didn't bother me at all because Liz Crowe didn't saturate the entire story with soccer scenes, she put just enough soccer in it to add dimension to her characters' backgrounds, after all both Metin and Mel have deep roots in soccer.Red Card may technically be a romance novel, as there isn't an official sub-genre for books like Liz's (Yet. But I still have hope there will be), but I can say with all honesty that this is a book that men can enjoy as well.