Review: Evokative, tender, real & victorious
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 17, 2014
Some books take work to settle into. You read the first page, then you glance at the first paragraph again because you forgot the heroine's name. The story set up brings questions to mind, and those questions might or might not be answered as quickly as you would like. Then there are books that have you from the first line. You settle into them like a worn easy chair. You don't ask questions because you're too involved in the story, too wrapped up in the characters' heads to think outside the immediate action. Hold on Tight was that kind of book for me. It grabbed me on the first page and didn't let go until the end. Even after finishing, I still thought about the characters and their story.The first chapter has a sub-heading: Eight years ago. In some ways, because of that heading, it has the feel of a prologue. Sometimes when a book starts with a past event, I feel myself rushing to get through it so I get to where the "real" story starts. It wasn't like that with Hold on Tight.The past event in chapter one is written from the hero's point of view. Serena Bell hooked me with prose that was authentically that of a twenty-year-old guy with a massive crush on a girl and also beautiful. If you had asked me before reading Hold on Tight, I would have said making a twenty-year-old guy seem authentic with beautiful prose is impossible. Serena does it, and I was captivated by the internal voice she gave to her hero, Jake.Chapter two begins with the subheading: Eight years later. There's no waiting around to see why the story picks up eight years later, and it is a punch. Even after reading the blurb and knowing what's in store for Mira, the first line of chapter two hit me in the gut. Hard. I had become so lost in the past events of chapter one that I had pretty much forgotten the blurb and felt the shock of that first line like a physical blow of drama. It was very cool to feel so much by reading words. That is what a great author does, make you feel with his or her words.As you can discern from the blurb, this book is about two people re-connecting after a long time apart. Jake has been an Army Ranger and has been on the battlefield, fulfilling the mantle of purpose he donned as a young man. This virile, purpose-filled young man is the one we meet in chapter one. This is not the man Jake is in chapter two. He is wounded. He feels responsible for terrible things that have happened to those under his command. He is angry. He is lost. This is the man Mira meets again, serendipitously, at a physical therapist's office. He is Jake but not. He is the man she gave her tender eighteen-year old heart and body to eight years ago, but not. He is her son's father, but not, because he doesn't even know about Sam. She'd never been able to find him to tell him. So she tells him there in the physical therapists office, and Jake's reaction is, well, you'll have to pick up this fabulous book to find out.Mira is on a search for independence. Being single and pregnant at such a young age, she leaned on her father and stepmother out of necessity. But it's time for her to be an adult. To be her son's provider and sole caretaker. Mira needs to find out who Mira is and what Mira is capable of. So she moves across the country to Seattle, where a real, adult job and a life of relying on herself and no one else are waiting for her.Enter the angry, alpha male ex-Army Ranger who likes to take charge. Serena Bell sets up a lovely dynamic of give and take, push and retreat with these two. Their hearts are all wrapped up in their past together, but they have the maturity to see each other in the present for the extraordinary people their pasts have shaped them into. Their love (and lust) is rekindled, but based on who they are now, not who they had been.Hold on Tight is filled with fabulous, emotionally evocative writing, tension on every page, and it ends with a sense of victory, not the victory these characters would have imagined for themselves in chapter one, but the victory they could only have learned to appreciate by embracing their present identities, and each other.Because it is captivating from beginning to end, because it is smart, because it reached into my chest and tugged on my heart, because the writing is beautiful, You Gotta Read Serena Bell's Hold on Tight.