From the Bookshelf of 2016 Reading Challenge Group…

Breathe (Colorado Mountain, #4)

Kristen Ashley

Start date: April 25, 2016

Finish date: April 30, 2016

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Apr 23, 2016 Peg - reading heals rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: romance, forced-myself-to-finish

I just ran a reading marathon with a pebble in my shoe that got larger and sharper as the book progressed. I am exhausted and I'm going to have to read a grammar book to counteract the damage done to my brain.

This book was a frustrating endurance test for me. There are two reasons I forced myself to continue and finish it: 1) there was one plot thread that I found interesting so I wanted to find out what happened and 2) about 250 pages in, as I was getting ready to delete it from my Kindle, I r I just ran a reading marathon with a pebble in my shoe that got larger and sharper as the book progressed. I am exhausted and I'm going to have to read a grammar book to counteract the damage done to my brain.

This book was a frustrating endurance test for me. There are two reasons I forced myself to continue and finish it: 1) there was one plot thread that I found interesting so I wanted to find out what happened and 2) about 250 pages in, as I was getting ready to delete it from my Kindle, I realized that I could use this for the "read a book over 600 pages" category in my book challenge group; having already spent the time slogging through 1/3 of the book, I was determined to get some value from it.

The writing is awful. Run on sentences. Glaring grammatical errors. I found myself stopping and rereading sentences repeatedly before I could make sense of them. There are endless, irrelevant descriptions of clothing, rooms, and characters' movements (an entire paragrah describing how a man sits on the couch: how his knees are bent, the distance between his knees, where his feet are, the position of his elbow in relation to the armrest . . . exhausting). The heroine using the words Frak and Frakiing was a cute Battlestar Gallactica reference until she began using them in every.other.sentence. and made me hate them. I can't understand how the book was published as is. Does the publisher not employ editors?

It felt like the author was trying to weave a complex mystery/crime subplot, but I found it boring with no payoff. The hero is the strong-but-tormented-man-who-thinks-he-is-bad-to-the-core-but-is-really-a-good-person. The heroine is a 29 year old small town good-girl librarian who is still a virgin. They come together immediately and are clearly meant to be. She heals him and redeems him. Ugh. Formulas like this are tried and true but I like my formulaic characters to be fleshed out enough that I am not constantly noticing the formula. The characters' voices were sometimes distinct, but for the most part all of the characters sound interchangeable.

Good points: I got a huge kick out of the heroine's love of Firefly, Star Wars, etc and her relationship with her online besties. The story of the homeless, abused boy Malachi was interesting and had some weight to it, although like the rest of the book that plot resolved quickly and neatly. ...more

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