Nicole Reads A Lot

This is a great book for anybody who is a fan of fish out of water stories.

Paige is a sympathetic protagonist who learns that first impressions in a small town can pay dividends for a very long time. I’m not a big fan of small town romances that feature humble, salt of the earth people who are direct foils to the evil, selfish, shallow city idiots who sling around their big city rudeness before being driving back to their dens of iniquity. I like small towns. I like cities. I don’t like any book that relies only on stereotypes to depict the citizens of either type of area.

While some of the supporting cast in this book were more caricatures than characters, I still enjoyed this story. It was interesting to watch Paige feel her way around life in Florida, and overcome the lingering wounds left by her last relationship.  Brendan was a great guy, and even though he was interested in her all along, the way that he took care of Paige wasn’t a ploy to get in her pants. I appreciated how much effort he put into helping her build a life.

Ms. Richard did an excellent job of building emotion. Her funny scenes were really funny, and the sad ones hit me right in the feels. This book was a great start to the series, and I look forward to reading the next one.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book. Amber and Marcus come with the traumatic back stories that are almost de rigeur in this genre, but they were both more than the things they’d suffered. Ms. Lindenblatt did a great job creating convincing characters who were more than the sum of their tragedies. The way that they interacted made me believe that each was integral to the other’s healing process, and even Marcus’ wounded manwhore thing worked for me.

I liked the dynamic between Ella and Quinn. I felt really bad for Quinn with regard to his relationship with his family, and liked that Ella had a stable and loving family; sometimes it feels like a real drag to read a book where everybody’s home life is awful. While I did feel that Quinn’s self-loathing was at times really hard to read without rolling my eyes, I had to remember that 1) the character is pretty young and 2) without a good support network, it’s understandable that he could feel that he had to bear such a huge burden by himself.

I liked that Ella had such a good head on her shoulders. She wasn’t rash, and I applauded how fair she tried to be in every situation. I was worried that the identity thing was going to be a major to-do in this book, but I liked how Ms. Lee handled it. It didn’t feel that things were unnecessarily melodramatic in this book, and my eyes didn’t get the “that’s ridiculous” workout. This is definitely a cut above the $.99 new adult novels that populate online booksellers these days, and I recommend it to fans of the genre. I didn’t read the other book in this series prior to reading Before You Break, but I’m definitely going to buy it at some point in the future.