Review: Love Reconnection by Sagarika

 The Blurb:

Brandon
I am back to claim the one who was always mine- My Gem
Linden
Now I will get to test your true loyalty, Jenny. It’s either me or him.
Brandon
I won’t let her suffer under Linden’s wrath. I will shower her with the happiness she deserves.
Linden
It’s pain that always tied us together. It will be the same pain that will set us free.
Brandon
It was always supposed to be Jennifer and Brandon. Linden ruined my chance.
Linden
She is the only one for me. It’s always been only her.
Brandon
It’s now or never. I won’t ever let her go. She is mine for keeps.
Linden
It’s too late for another chance and yet my life is in her hands.
Jennifer
Linden was slowly changing. He was beginning to trust me again, but Brandon is back and claims to love me. Have I really got a chance with my first love? Or should I keep my hopes high that Linden will give our relation another chance? I am torn between the two again and this time I will finally have to make my choice.

If you haven’t read Love Connection, you’ll want to do that before reading this one.

In Love Connection, I really didn’t like Linden. His love for Jen/Gem seemed based more on the idea of love. Honestly, I didn’t really like Brandon, either. He was selfish and his world revolved around whatever he wanted in the moment, even at the end. The thing about this series is that we are not expected to like the characters going in, and I dug that. We get an opportunity to watch something more real, more flawed. And there is plenty of that to go around!

In Love Reconnection, one thing I was NOT expecting was the level to which Linden has spiraled. He’s spent years treating Jen like shit, but it is clear from his own inner monologue that he loves her and doesn’t want to admit how much he cares because it would make him vulnerable. That being said, I do not condone emotional abuse, which is exactly what he is inflicting upon her. He even goes so far as to tell her he “fucking hates her” and pushes her into a sexual situation with dubious consent just so Brandon can hear it.

Her response? “You do care, in your own twisted way.” WHAT?! We know from Linden’s internal thoughts that he is deriving just as much pleasure from making Brandon miserable as anything else. She later tells Brandon that Linden “has rights over her” and he “can treat her however he wants”. That’s…never a good sign.



Linden is just so angry, and it’s almost comical the way people around him respond to it. At one point, he picks up a phone call from her only to yell “I FUCKING HATE YOU, LEAVE ME ALONE!” and the girl next to him replies: "All I can conclude is that Jennifer Collins is your girlfriend."

Buttttt I still don’t understand Jen’s actions, either. Despite deciding to play out this twisted form of penance with Linden, she asks Linden for permission to be friends with Brandon when he suddenly pops back up. Now, Linden is being a jerk so in that regard I don’t necessarily feel sorry for him. But still. Even in the best of circumstances, this is usually considered a dick move, I think? It’s like watching a reality show and yelling at the people on the screen. I want throw a pillow at the tv when Jen is on screen.



Their “unique form of love” is complex, I’ll give it that. But I don’t agree with the way it has manifested, any more than I do for Brandon. I agree with Jen, he tuck tailed and ran, rather than fight for what he claims to love so much. It’s all so deliciously fucked up. And it culminates in a way that somehow manages to acknowledge that and face it down (a conversation between Brandon and Linden that is TENSE and cathartic). I absolutely love the detail to which Linden’s character was developed in this sequel, but I am still not sure that he is a good person, even as he comes to grips with the fact that he loves Jen so deeply.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I definitely did not expect it. This is gritty, flawed, and real. Love can be beautiful and it can be ugly. What an emotional ride!! I was happy to finally get an HEA out of all this!!!

Review: The Contract by Melanie Moreland

The Blurb:

A tyrant by day, a playboy by night. That is the reputation that precedes Richard VanRyan. He lives life the way he wants, no concern for the opinion of others. He cares for no one, is completely unrepentant, and he has no desire to change his ways.

Katharine Elliott works under Richard as his PA. She despises him and his questionable ethics, but endures all the garbage he sends her way, because she needs the job. Her end goal is far more important than the daily abuse and demands she tolerates from her nasty tyrant of a boss.

Until the day, he asks her for something she never expected. A new role with a personal contract — fiancée instead of PA.

What happens when two people who loathe each other, have to live together and act as though they are madly in love?

Sparks.

That’s what happens.

Can the power of love really change a person?

Will they survive the contract?

What do you do when the one person you hate the most becomes the one person you can’t live without?

I am a sucker for this sort of storyline, so I was super excited to check it out. Put into practice, however, I admit I was a little disappointed with the characters’ overall likeability.



Katharine, the saccharine sweet personal assistant, is so fucking saintly that I just wanted to roll my eyes every time I was reminded of her plight. I get it, everyone on the planet loves her except Richard. All I’m saying is, characters like this are usually there to get hit by a car or something and make the other character have some sort of epiphany about life and love. I didn’t make the rules. Take it up with Nicholas Sparks.



Richard is such an unrepentant dick (haha, I see what she did there), but not in that way that I enjoy in my alpha males. He was a straight up douche, lacking in wit, and seemingly unredeemable, even by his own inner monologues. His scheme is so deplorable and insensitive that I was just sort of annoyed by him in general.

Fortunately for him, by throwing a hissy fit and threatening to quit his job, he has put Katharine in a position of pure desperation (as she will likely lose her job in the process). She has no choice but to acquiesce to his pitch: pretend to be in love with him, engaged to him, even marry him if he deems it necessary in order to get what he wants: a job at a family-friendly advertising firm that specializes in NOT being giant dickwads.



First of all, WHY Richard would want to work at this rival firm was beyond me. His personality was so despicable that I can’t comprehend how he thought he could reasonably alter his behavior enough to be accepted there.



I kind of hated how Katharine’s character developed as well. The trope of the ugly duckling just needing a makeover to become the beautiful swan is frustrating enough, but I was given to understand that Katharine was already beautiful and Richard was just a snobby asshole. To imply that she needed new window dressings to become appealing to him just makes him seem like that much more of an asshole.


Seriously, fuck that guy.

Of course they fall in love, Richard sees the error of his ways, yadda yadda yadda. Surely after so much tension and bickering the sex will be incredibly hot…I thought to myself hopefully.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!

As some of you may have a noticed, I have not updated in some time. Due to life events, I had to postpone my blogging for about a month to take care of other matters. However, I look forward to returning to my favorite pastime now that we've begun 2017. 

Though I am still accepting review requests, I ask for your patience as I start to catch up on some of my reviews. If I have already accepted a review request from you, be assured that those reviews will be my first priority for January. I will update everyone in February once I've had the opportunity to catch up!

Review: Death by Roses by Vivian R. Probst

The Blurb:

 
For the first time in nearly thirty years of marriage, Art McElroy Sr. buys his headstrong, disapproving wife a dozen yellow roses. Hours later he discovers her lifeless body seated on the toilet. Mae Rose McElroy's sudden death leaves a void in her family and in the entire Midwestern farming community of Fairview. It's a void Mae Rose will attempt to fill, herself, from the hereafter by meddling directly in earthly affairs.

Mae Rose's meddling leads to her spiritual expulsion from heaven, and she winds up in the body of Mary Lee Broadmoor (Scary Mary), a crusty writer and director of exquisite horror movies. Mary Lee refuses to succumb to stage-4 pancreatic cancer until she gets one final shot at an elusive Oscar. Like Mae Rose, who argues with God for a return to earth, Mary Lee pleads, from her Hollywood deathbed, for more time to complete her work, as her hospice nurse, Gertie Morgan, looks on.

The two women's spirits work together, and Mae Rose provides her host with a new script idea: a love story, based on her life! The script earns Mary Lee her coveted Academy Award, but the movie's release shocks and disturbs Mae Rose's family. They set out to find, and confront, the woman who has somehow co-opted, and publicly revealed, their personal tragedy.

Along the way, new love emerges as the reader meets a caste of crazy, eccentric, but highly memorable characters. "Death by Roses" suggests that relationships don't end at death, but continue until their ultimate purpose is achieved. The universe has every resource at its disposal to get the job done. It also has an amazing sense of humor.

  

Writer was generously provided with ARC in exchange for my honest review. This wasn’t the typical smutty romance I usually read, but the plot was really intriguing!

The protagonist, Mae Rose, has met her end on the seat of her commode…a fact I came to appreciate even more the more I got to know her character. As deaths ago, that's definitely not the way anyone wants to go out.



Mae Rose is meddlesome, sharp-tongued, and a bit annoying, even after death. If I’m being honest, she’s not my favorite character of the book going in, but I like that she was never insisted upon as such. She had one job: don’t interfere in the lives of the living. Can she do that? Absolutely not. So she gets the boot back to the realm of the living.



Now she must share the body of another woman, Mary Lee, a director who just wants another shot at recognition before she succumbs to her own health issues. The two women have to work together to help Mary Lee realize her vision and get that Oscar.

For the record, if I die, someone help me get a RITA?

The storyline is pretty golden, most of the time. It’s funny, it’s dramatic, sometimes a bit of both. I liked the morbidity of the circumstances, just sort of hanging over everything like a giant ironic rain cloud. After a while I started to read this almost in the same tone as Steel Magnolias. My mind made Mae Rose into Ouiser. And then I really started to like her.

Probst gives a lot of attention to each of her characters, which is great but it can get overwhelming at times. POV transitions between several characters, which was necessary for this sort of plot, but I think it could have been scaled back a bit. Occasionally got confused between Mary Lee and Mae Rose.



What I liked most about this story was the honesty. Think of your most annoying relative at Thanksgiving dinner. Now, when they pass, think of the choices they might make, about their personality and their nature. Picture them arguing with God. Probst’s writing tackles death in an often humorous way, but also reminds us that our flaws are not something that have to be glossed over just because we’ve passed onto the other side. Even after death, we can continue to grow. For me, that’s the good stuff.

Review: Broken (Frost Series #1) by D.L. LeBlanc

Actual Rating: 2.5 stars

 

The Blurb:

After a man had left her broken, she successfully shut herself off from all men. She loved her organised, boring life; until she meets him. Could he break through her barriers and make her want to live & love again?

He wasn't looking for anything serious. He was there on business, and his motto was get in, get out, and move on; until he meets her. Could she break through and become more valuable to him than his business empire?

First thoughts reading this was that it seemed like a fiction inspired by Fifty Shades/Twilight. There are some striking similarities, including the sexy millionaire, the hot brother interested in her best friend, a loud mouthed sister, and the annoying creepy friend-zone guy who has trouble understanding the word “No.”

Even the circumstances of Katie and Jaxon's initial meetings were reminiscent of Fifty Shades, like this line:

“Katie,” he breathes. “You’re making it hard for me to behave.”

“Then don't.”



Yeah, creepy guy who somehow already knows where she lives. Don’t.



The only major difference is that in this case, Ana/Bella/Katie has had some past trauma that has shaped how she approaches sex and relationships, and the big secret is hers to tell rather than Jaxon/Edward/Christian’s. This was a missed opportunity to say eff it to Fifty Shades and go down a completely new rabbit hole, in my opinion. The opening of the book is so gritty and intense, I just wished the subsequent story had taken another direction.

The storytelling isn’t bad, it’s just…clearly based on someone else’s work. There were not enough discrepancies to lead me to believe it is just coincidence. The dialogue sometimes gets cumbersome, i.e. “I’ll go to the place…” “Okay…” “So…bye…” “Yeah…bye…” (dramatization). This takes place via text as well.

What I would have liked to see more focus on was the actual building of intimacy and more inner dialogue from Katie about getting into another sexual relationship post psycho-ex. I didn’t want to hear about it via dialogue or text, I wanted to hear about it in the moment, perhaps even just as an unexpressed thought. After such an intense opening, I felt like the entire book should have conveyed the tension of those first few paragraphs considering it impacted Katie's ability to have sex for years to follow.

Anywho, for readers who liked Fifty Shades, this is a safe pick.

Review: Borden by R.J. Lewis

  The Blurb:

Marcus Borden has always been used to power and control. After a crime-filled upbringing in a very harsh neighbourhood, Borden leaves his hometown, returning four years later mysteriously rich and unrecognizable, with one woman on his mind.
A woman he'll never have.
Pained by his devastating loss and filled with rage and guilt, Borden's world turns dark.

*
As a fiercely independent woman, Emma Warne knows all about hard living. Having kept to herself most of her life, the last thing she expects is to be thrust into the world of infamous criminal Marcus Borden, the dangerous man the entire city fears and loathes. But the more she pushes him away, the more he comes back, taking over her life and stripping her of her control she desperately clings to.

Once Borden has his sights on her, Emma is going nowhere anytime soon, and what she doesn't expect least of all... is that she may not want to either.

 

 

 

Borden is one of those books that I feel like every other person on my feed has read, so I guess it was just time. And it did not disappoint.



It’s going to be hard to write this review completely sans spoilers. I have warned you thusly.



Part One of Borden, as a whole, could be scrapped in my opinion. I didn’t need it. A simple prologue would have sufficed. The reader has to spend something like 65 pages focusing on the wrong girl. And she’s annoying, to boot. I get it, Borden has loved and lost...a rich girl who wasn’t even into anything he liked sexually and her family hated him, but okay. There was just no spark, no chemistry at all with them. Girl even died admitting Borden was probably more in love with the idea of her. Yeesh.

Moving on to the good stuff: Part Two.

Marcus Borden is a very large, very scary dude covered in tattoos. He’s committed to ruling the city’s criminal underworld with an iron fist, and everyone pretty much knows his name, if not his face. Like Bane, only prettier.


Bane is not holding a puppy in this pic.

Emma grew up in the same neighborhood as Borden, tough as nails out of necessity. She carries a switchblade under her boobs. As you do. She’s had a prior run-in with Borden when she was younger, though she doesn’t remember him. Her current problem: she’s witnessed a murder by some of Borden’s men.



Borden, on the other hand, remembers Emma very clearly. He becomes enamored with her boldness towards him and makes arrangements to keep her close, regardless of how Emma feels about the whole thing. The slow-building chemistry between the two is HOT. When they finally close the deal, oh myyy.

This book hit a lot of my key “S” areas for a good romance: slow burn, suspenseful, sexy alpha, sassy protagonist, and of course...spanking.



Book ends on a cliffy, but I don’t even mind. Reading the sequel as we speak, looking forward it!

Review: Stutter by A. Zavarelli

The Blurb:

Someone once told me that happiness is fleeting. I can see now that he was right.

I’m trapped in a black hole of darkness I can’t seem to crawl out of. My twin and my lover want each other dead and I’m pregnant with a baby I don’t know how to protect.

Ryland says he will do anything to get me back, but how do you trust the man who almost killed you? When every option before you comes at a cost, how do you choose the right path?

People say that history has a way of repeating itself. Six years after the fact, my father’s actions are still haunting me. When I learn about an old debt yet to be settled, everything changes. It might not matter who I trust anymore when my every breath brings me one step closer to the end of this twisted game.

DNF



Oh FFS. Protagonist gets preggers at the end of the last book, and she's still fucking obsessed with her former blackmailer a la Stockholm Syndrome. Now she's all emotional and misses him, despite the fact that he ALMOST KILLED HER at the end of the last book (not to mention her unborn child). How's that for a fucking bedtime story, junior?

Better yet:
"How did you and mommy meet?"
"Well, son, I blackmailed her to be my sex slave and it turns out she was reallllly lacking in better options."

UGH. Just UGH.


So by the middle of the book, everything is forgiven and peachy again, and thank god, because girl almost had to live in a shitty apartment with like, no money. Can you imagine? At this point, had I been reading a physical copy, I'd have thrown the damn thing across the room.