Review: Eric can write me letters anyday.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 15, 2014
I found Hard Time on Netgalley and thought it looked rather interesting. It’s easy to find books about ex-cons but to find a book about two characters meeting and falling in love while the one is is prison, it doesn’t happen that often. At least not that I’ve found. I wasn’t completely sold on the book though from it’s synopsis so I ended up looking at a few reviews on Goodreads and I was sold.I’ll be honest with you, I do not think Hard Time is a fairly well written book. I’m not judging that opinion off the mistakes, I mean, it is an ARC. However, that did detract from me liking the actual story.Anne is fairly likable even if she is a bit nave. She’s going into a new job and part of that entails working as an outreach librarian/teacher at a local prison. All good. But while she’s there she meets an inmate and, in her own words, it’s “insta-lust.” She’s not expecting it because of her past, she was abused by an ex. It’s been years since she felt anything close to sexual, but with one look from inmate 802267 something has awoken in her.802267′s real name is Eric Collier. He’s been incarcerated for 5 years now and is just doing his time until he can get out. When he first sees Anne, he wants to know more, so he starts writing her letters, and what letters they are!The best part of Hard Time are the letters from Eric to Anne. They are very sexual, yes, but they are also sweet in a way. For just as long as Anne hasn’t been interested in sex, Eric has been needing to get his feelings out about how he feels, about what he wants from a woman, what he wants to do for a woman. It’s very easy to see how the two fall in love.Things, for me, start to go south after he is granted parole. So much of the story up until that point was built around the letters the two wrote each other, the way their love was taboo. Once he’s paroled, we get to see everything that was written between the two come to fruition but it just didn’t excite me. I was hoping for something more I guess.I really did like Hard Time though. I don’t really know why either because I can think of a dozen things I didn’t like to the few things I did like. Odd, isn’t it? I think so. But it is a nice romantic story, I guess that’s why I like it. Eric isn’t a bad guy which is a nice change of pace. Like I said before, Anne is a bit nave, and gives some ultimatums I do not agree with, but I understand why she is the way she is.