Lee Piper's Blog - Posts Tagged "ava-harrison"

Sordid: A Novel by Ava Harrison

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There are so many swoon worthy, panty-melting tropes in Ava Harrison's new novel, Sordid. It's like a romance reader's all-you-can-eat buffet. CEO meets intern? Yep. Married man drawn to another woman. Uh huh. Domineering alpha meets heroine with a backbone? Absolutely. Family draaaaaama? Hell yes.

See what I mean?

And heroine, Bridget is intelligent, confident, honest, patient, driven-she is what so many of us strive to be. The reader feels an immediate kinship with her and is desperate for her to find a happily ever after. On the other hand, the hero is an enigma. Broody, short-tempered, stuck in a rut of his very own making, Grant cannot see a future where he is free of his power-hungry wife, Chelsea. However, over the course of the book, the reader learns the reasons behind his behaviour, and even though we might not always agree with his decisions, we empathise with his logic.

There is so much going for this novel, there truly is. However, I was often thrown out of the story. What I mean by this is there was so much telling rather than showing throughout. I found I wanted to jump straight to the parts where the characters were interacting via spoken dialogue because this is where the pacing, the intensity, the push and the pull between them is strongest. And Harrison does dialogue extremely well, so it was a shame there were large gaps without it. Instead, the reader was provided with contextual information we could have gleaned from the conversations themselves.

Regardless, I did enjoy Sordid. The combination of so many tropes is a romance reader's paradise. Just add a glass of wine and some chocolate and you've got everything you need for a blissful few hours.


***I kindly received an ARC in exchange for an honest review***




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