This book…I don’t know, it was one that I really wanted to like. I really, truly wanted to like it, but alas, I did not. It was good for the first 100 to 200 pages, then it just took a turn for left field. Like, I don’t even know what was happening towards the end of the book.
First off, I understand that it was a romance novel. It was a fluffy romance novel. I get that. I thought I knew what to expect whenever I went into it and I did like how she included certain themes that are relevant to today’s world, but I did not like how she handled it.
To start with, Holder is a boy who is surrounded by rumors of beating up a gay kid and being sent to juvie. It’s true. He did beat up a kid that was gay, but did not know it at the time. Holder was reacting to the things that the kid had said about his sister. He did not go to juvie, but spend time at his dad’s home in Austin, Texas.
Holder is a boy that I never would have welcomed. He overreacts. He is slightly possessive. He is…well, he’s rude. I don’t care that he was trying to protect Sky from the truth about who she truly was. He’s a rude boy.
He’s also very handsy with Sky. I’ve read New Adult books before, but he was overly handsy. Touching her whenever she was crying. Holding her would have been a sufficient way to soothe her. No doing other things.
He’s not the only one. Sky was very handsy as well. He treats her like dirt. He comes back to her after abandoning her for a month. She forgives him way too easy.
I blame the author. Sky and Holder, towards the end of the book, learned some very upsetting information about who they are. How did they respond? Sexually. I did not feel as though that was the appropriate response. Sky watched her father kill himself (albeit, he was a rapist who had raped his sister, his daughter, and the girl who lived out next door–who turned out to be Holder’s twin sister). Anyone would be shaken up by watching someone point a gun at their head and then shoot themselves. And, Sky and Holder were. To a degree. Not nearly as much as they realistically should have been.
Nor did they react realistically to finding out that Sky’s father had raped Holder’s sister. In my opinion, Holder barely had any reaction to the news. He was focused on Sky. Which is fair. She was trying to cope with the fact that she had been kidnapped from her father, but Holder had also just learned some disturbing news, so did he not have the right to react? To grive? To be angry? He had a brief moment, but it was much too brief.
After everything that Holder and Sky have been through, I would think that they would not be as okay as they truly are. I mean, Sky tearing her old room apart is realistic, but she was not as torn up as a normal person would have been. She found out that she had been kidnapped, raped, then that her kidnapper was actually her aunt who was raped by Sky’s father. She found out that the reason she didn’t have access to any technology was because her aunt didn’t want Sky to discover who she really was nor did she want Sky’s father to find them.
I understand that it’s a fictional novel. I know that. However, I felt as though it could have been more realistic. It felt as though Hoover didn’t do any research when she wrote about a character who was a victim of rape. It may have been when Sky was five years old, but she just remembered the events that took place. That is not something that one merely gets over.
This is just a brief summary of the things that bothered me. There were others, but I’ll keep that to myself. To be honest, this is a book that will probably end up in my donation pile. I had high hopes for it and those high hopes were met with severe disappointment.
There’s a second book, told from Holder’s point of view, which I find to be unnecessary because I think we get a pretty good picture of Holder’s thoughts from the first book.
Rating: 2 of 5 stars
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