Tera Chambers has carved out a decent life for herself as a romance author. She lives in a fancy city apartment, has a boyfriend whom she likes but is in no danger of losing her heart to, and most important of all, after ten long years, she has finally managed to bury a tragic past she’d rather forget.
But everything changes with a single phone call.
When Tera is called home to look after her ill father in the small town of Ray River, the place she grew up in, she is forced to face everything and everyone she ran away from. Including Lane.
The only man she has ever loved.
But the last time Tera listened to her heart, at the tender age of eighteen, it ended in tragedy. Will Tera give in to the feelings she still has for Lane? Or will she listen to her head and vow to never risk hurting her loved ones again?
I should have checked this app before wasting my time on this book. There were so many editing errors in it that I lost count. The first chapter I thought it might at least be interesting, but it just wasn’t. I don’t believe that I have ever given a book such a low rating, and I do feel badly about it. However, I just couldn’t find one single redeeming quality in it. The relationship with her new friend was slightly more fleshed out than the love interest.
The concept of this book is interesting but I was disappointed as I read on. At the start of the book I believed the story would revolve around grief and I was looking forwarding to learning from the main character, Tera, and experiencing the healing process with her. Unfortunately this was not the case because the logistics of how Tera resolved her shame felt off and didn’t seem like she grew much as a person. The suspense of what Tera had done in the past and the guilt she felt increased my expectations for the book, so I was expecting somewhat of a crazy event, but it was underwhelming to find out she wasn’t even directly involved in her friend’s death yet believes she was responsible for it. For most of the book I had believed Tera had murdered her friend due to her feeling extremely detached from her relationship with her boyfriend, not seeming to be able to live a normal life like everybody else, and being afraid and extremely anxious when going back to her old town. In the end of the novel, it made more sense that she was afraid because her father had sent her off in such a hurry and the friend’s father was angry and threatened to kill her, but I didn’t understand her fear of her father hating her. My impression of Tera is that she was a pushover and was consumed by her guilt for too long for illogical reasons, which made it difficult to root for her. She seemed very immature for her age, especially the crush on Lane she had that seemed to prevail above all else a decade later. Maybe I’m not the target audience for this book because the character is supposedly consumed by their grief and shame and I cannot resonate with it, because I find it crazy that it affects her so strongly 10 years after the incident occurred, so realistically she would have dealt with it better as she matured. Overall I wouldn’t recommend this book because it was unclear whether the goal was to experience grief with the character or whether this was a romance novel, which is a stretch since I resonated with somebody’s comment saying she spent more time with her new platonic guy friend than the love interest. Also the random drama at the end where it seemed like there was this big scandal with her father cheating on her mother in the past, and her friend actually being her sister was a desperate attempt to make the ending more interesting and ruined the story line since there wasn’t much leading up to it. There are more things I could add but I feel I’ve critiqued this book enough. Apologies to the author if there were personal experiences reflected in parts of the book but I couldn’t make sense of the story.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
If you’re looking for a good second chance romance you’ll probably want to pass this one up. It started off intriguing enough and I was interested to see where the story was going/what Tera supposedly did that was so bad but it quickly went downhill. It’s supposed to be a second chance between Tera and her high school fling Lane but for literally 90% of the book they barely interact and she’s off going on “friend dates” with another guy, who in my opinion she had far more chemistry with. There were so many side plots thrown in that it kind of hindered what could have been a really emotional story but it just did not work. There were also so many grammar issues that it distracted me at points from what was going on.
Wow, this was a tough read! While the emotions were running awry, I also felt that most of the book went into the whole suspense and grief part that we barely got to connect with the MCs, and the ending is HFN. So, I am a bit bummed about how thrown off this read was in comparison to what I expected from a romance novel POV. This seems more like a mystery/suspense kind of book than romance. We barely saw the MCs for the most part together on page. I would have loved for a stronger storyline on the MCs and not drag the current storyline or wrap the current storyline as it has been now which is in a very open ended way. Also, I would have loved the MMC's POV as well for a bit more emotional connect.
I would give this a 3.5. The story line was intriguing and kept my attention. However, I felt this should have been edited more. There were several missing words and grammatical errors that interrupted the flow of the book for me. Overall I really enjoyed reading this!
An emotional roller coaster. You really feel for the characters and what they are going through. It needed to go through one more round of edits before publishing.