Series: Avoiding #1
Author: K.A. Linde
Genre: New Adult/Romance
Maturity Rating: 17+
Rating: 4.5/5
My Quickie Synopsis: Years after their tumultuous relationship ended, Jack calls his ex Lexi, requesting that she assist him in quite a bizarre favor. Jack, penultimate playboy, is settling down, and he needs Lexi to convince his bride-to-be that he's the marrying kind. As you can imagine, this creates a plethora of complications for our heroine Lexi. Will she be able to be around Jack again without falling back into old habits?
Character Building: 1/1
I am not going to lie; I strongly dislike these characters. There aren't many redeeming qualities bouncing around within the story for our heroine or our hero and it makes it hard to want to truly connect with them. But regardless of wanting to distance myself from these characters, I was still immersed in their story. No matter how messed up Lexi and Jack show themselves to be, they still feel real. My only hope is that they grow in the coming books, because this book is already pushing my limits at how much ridiculousness I can handle!
Plot Strength: 1/1
It's not hard to understand what's going on in this story. It's pretty basic in its delivery, and the plot points all add up. The twists that Ms. Linde creates are well done and I think that they definitely aid in the growth of both Lexi and Jack. The ending makes sense and gives me hope that the series is headed in a good direction. Fingers crossed!
Sincerity: 0.5/1
There's a part of me that believes that people really are this self-centered and horrible. But there's also a part of me that doesn't think that circumstances could reach such a height of ridiculous awfulness and glaring coincidences. I struggled with how everything perfectly fell apart. In a sense, the story felt a little too manufactured at times, as if Ms. Linde believed that in order to give her readers the idea of how terrible everything was, she had to overwhelm them with it.
Editing: 1/1
The book is well written and very easy to read in terms of its grammatical quality.
Pacing: 1/1
I think the pacing was perfect for this book. There was a lot to delve into, especially when it came to building up the characters and their messy relationships. I can't imagine the pace being any quicker because as a reader, you'd miss out on a lot of the little subtle interactions that make the book. If the pacing was any slower, I might have had a heart attack because of all the angst. Truly.
My Icing on Top:
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| How I feel about this story right about now. |
As a quick aside, I am also on Goodreads. However, if you happen to stumble across my profile there, you'll see that there are times when my ratings there and my ratings here on my blog don't match up. The reason for this is that I try to make my blog reviews as objective as possible. But on Goodreads, I generally rate a book as soon as I'm done with it, so it's more of a gut feeling than a true, thoughtful rating.
My gut feeling for this book? Two stars. No lie! I abhorred how this book made me feel. But that's the point. This book is not a feel good book. It's not the misunderstood hot guy or the strong heroine that many readers have come to expect in this particular genre. It's gritty and it's messy and it's probably going to piss you off more than you thought humanly possible.
If you can get past that (or hey, maybe you love this kind of thing), there's a lot of good writing underneath. As I said before, my only hope is that these characters show and sustain real growth; otherwise, I really might not be able to carry on with their story. I had my fill of angst in high school and college, thank you!
Happy reading!
-K
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