Author: Sara Hantz
Publisher: Entangled Crush
Published: October 12th 2015
Format: eARC | Pages: 170
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Source: Publisher
★★✩ (2.5/5) Stars
Sara Hantz | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads
Ruby Davis has a crush on her brother’s best friend. At least, he was his bestie until the big betrayal. Now Drew is off limits to everyone, especially Ruby. She can’t stand the way people treat him, or the way he feels about himself. It isn’t right. And those deep green eyes are calling to her.
Drew is scarred and damaged, and he has no business even looking at Ruby. But he can’t help himself. She’s beautiful, but he does his best to stay away. When they are assigned a school project, they become reluctant friends – even though they want so much more.
She’s torn between her feelings for Drew and loyalty to her brother. There’s no way they can ever be together...but love just might find a way.
I received a copy of this book, from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review. In no way did this sway either my review or my rating.
I think out of all the ARCs that I had gotten over the last month or so, this one was the one that I was most looking forward to. I mean, it sounded so sweet and angsty and I love the whole falling for the brother's best friend trope and add to it the fact that there was some betrayal so they weren't even friends anymore, well, that had me even more intrigued. Unfortunately it took me most of the book to get sucked in to it, and even when I finally did it still wasn't like I was hanging on every word. It was more like a curiosity as to how it would turn around and come together. My problem now isn't about trying to figure out what didn't work for me, because I could tell you easily. It's going to be breaking it all down spoiler free.
I feel like most of what went wrong for me personally with this story is "Drew's big betrayal". It's really not just one thing. There's the thing that basically is his fault, that Mia's (her name in my ARC is Mia so I'm not sure what it will be in the finish book Ruby or Mia) brother Blake and everyone else has a right to be upset about. But then there's this other event, something that is huge and horrible and has nothing at all to do with Drew, but Drew himself and almost everyone else seems just as pissed about that as they are everything else. Almost more so, in Blake's case at least. And it was just ridiculous and kind of made me mad that he should be made to feel like it was something that was his fault or that he had any control over or made it happen in any way.
I really hope that makes even the slightest bit of sense because I really can't say what the incidents are although I feel like at least one of them could probably be pretty obvious.
Originally I really liked Drew, Mia and even Blake. Drew I consistently liked through the book. He was like my one bit of light throughout. He was pretty screwed up both physically and emotionally and it was easy to sympathize with his character. He had that lost, drawn into himself, self hating thing going on that made you want to be able to reach into the book and comfort him and try to convince him that he needed to stop blaming himself for something that was out of his hands. Mia I went back and forth with. Sometimes she was great and I appreciated the way she was drawn to Drew and wanted to be there for him when nobody else was. Sometimes, though, she would come off as whiny or unreasonable and I wouldn't understand where she was coming from.
Maybe a bit of my issues with the characters was also the fact that sometimes the dialogue just didn't fit or flow right. And at times they said things that weren't very teenagerish. I mean, how many teenagers do you know that use the word subterfuge especially when they're simply talking about keeping a relationship secret. For that matter how many adults use that word that casually? I don't know. Maybe that's just me being silly and nitpicking. It just didn't feel right at the moment and that was only one spot. But not the only one.
I'm really not sure where else to go from here. Like I said, it's going to be hard to explain clearly why this book and I didn't get on well without there being spoilers. I mean, I got to the point where I cared enough to want to find out how it ended, which is why I brought it up from 2 to 2.5 stars. But even then I felt more like I forced myself to get to that point so I couldn't go higher and feel right about it. That makes me sad because I had such high hopes for this one.
Thanks to Entangled Publishing for the opportunity to read and review this book.
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