Review: This was a really rough read for me and even though I really wanted to like it, in the end it just didn’t work for me.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 5, 2014
Review courtesy of Dark Faerie TalesQuick & Dirty: This was a really rough read for me and even though I really wanted to like it, in the end it just didn’t work for me.Opening Sentence: “Hey, babe, hand me my smokes.”The Review:Josie Banks had no memory of her past beyond a few years ago. Her father was murdered to protect her from having the same fate, and she was sent into a witness protection program where she was shuffled around for years. Now she is a broken person with no past and no future. She uses drugs and random hook-ups to numb the pain, but she never lets anyone into her life until someone from her forgotten past shows up.Tristan never forgot the girl he loved all his life. They were best friends growing up and eventually they became more, but when they were 14 she moved away. Shortly after that she was supposedly murdered and it broke a part of Tristan. He was never fully able to get over Mackenzie, and he made a lot of life altering decisions because of the grief. Now year’s later fate brings Mackenzie back into his life, but she goes by Josie now and she is a completely different girl then he remembers.Josie was a very hard character for me to relate too. She had given up on life and was really just a shell of a person. I get that she had crappy things happen to her, but she just came across as really weak to me. She was given opportunities to change her life, but she was too afraid to even try. As time went on she did get better, but for most of the story I really wasn’t a big fan of her.I am very torn on how I feel about Tristan. I liked that he had a photographic memory and said awkward things all the time. It made him endearing and sweet. But I hated how someone so smart could make such stupid life decisions. I realize that people do this in real life, but it frustrates me then too, so I really didn’t like that about him. For the most part I did like Tristan, he just had some majorly annoying flaws.I actually really enjoyed the first few chapters in this book, but after that it pretty much completely fell apart for me. My biggest issue was that there were way too many POV’s. I found that I didn’t care about half the characters and when I would come to one of their parts, I would just skim through it because I wasn’t really all that interested in them. Second, everything felt really unrealistic to me, and very over-dramatic. Because of this, I felt a huge disconnect with the story. Overall, this was a really rough read for me, but if the synopsis sounds promising to you, then go ahead and give it a try. Hopefully you have a better experience then I did.Notable Scene:She gasped as he ripped off his hooded sweatshirt and threw it to the ground. Brilliant inked images covered his arms, interrupted only by the white beater that molded to his body. He slammed his forehead into the wall and then landed punch after punch. His blood painted the bricks and Josie knew a part of him would die here this night.She sat stone-faced, her gaze fixed on the raging figure below. She was envious of such a physical kind of anger. She had never unleashed her fury that way and wondered if it would do any good. His chest heaved in a quick cadence, and Josie fought hard to keep her own breath even.In that moment, the moon broke through the clouds and cast a blanket of silvery light over the alley. He froze, mesmerized by the grid-pattern shadows created by the fire escape. His eyes traveled up the shadow as if  navigating a labyrinth, until a small, solid shape obstructed the path. He looked up, catching her.The pencil slipped from Josie’s grip, rolling and falling over the edge. As connected as she felt to the lead and wood, she did not watch it drop. Instead, she stared down into the face of something so familiar—heartache.She’d never seen such a beautiful, broken expression, and it took her breath away. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she registered the soft tap, tap, tap of the pencil hitting the ground.Josie felt bound to him in that moment. They were two souls snared by chance and circumstance. Though they did not feel like strangers.FTC Advisory: St. Martin’s Griffin/Macmillan provided me with a copy of Beautiful Addictions. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review.