Friday, April 18, 2014

Perfectly Broken

As soon as I saw Prescott Lane had another book up for review, I jumped on the chance because I liked her first book First Position. It turns out I liked this one even better.

Perfectly Broken - Prescott Lane
Perfectly Broken
Even after years of trauma therapy, Peyton still believes she’s broken. She has little desire to date or show off her natural beauty, content simply to hang out with her best friends and run her pie shop in New Orleans. But her world turns upside-down when a handsome architect and self-confessed player shows up in her shop and thinks she’s perfect, much more than the usual hook-up. While Peyton does her best to resist his charms, believing she could never be enough for him, she can’t deny the obvious heat between them. With Reed determined to have her, Peyton must decide whether to continue to hide behind her apron and baggy clothes or take a chance and share her scars with Reed, a man with a playboy reputation and scars of his own -- a dark past he can’t possibly share with Peyton, not after learning the horrors she’s endured. But if they can find a way to trust each other, and themselves, they just might be able to heal, to save each other, to live perfectly broken together.

To be honest, when I started this book I immediately thought, "oh good, yet another romance novel that starts out with our female being a rape victim" and got annoyed. But then it turns out Peyton isn't a total sissy. Sure, she's unreasonable and she had a tendency to just run away from problems that are easily dealt with by communication and she practices a hard double standard with the lack of communication. She's all of those things. Then you have Reed who begins as a womanizer with commitment issues because of his father. Put them together and it's kind of an adorable relationship and story. 

The really great thing is that while Reed doesn't understand why Peyton is hesitant over intimacy, he respects it. He would always like a lot more and finds it hard to slow himself down and not ask for too much, but he respects whatever her reason is. And that will always be commendable. As their relationship develops, you see Peyton becoming more trusting of Reed and you can see the attachment between the two of them forming. A few bumps in the road (because of lack of communication) that put major strains on their relationship. Neither one of them handle it well, and I got a little worried about Reed making a pretty poor choice, but dammit- he rallied and I silently (oh, I'm kidding- I kicked my leg in the air and smacked my still asleep husband) cheered for him. And them. I was rooting for this couple the whole time.

I do feel like the story fell a little flat with Reed's father, I really hoped we'd get more meat out of that story line. Aside from that? Great book. It keeps you hooked and you have all kinds of drama. You have Reed and Peyton trying to date without having sex or being intimate, you have Heather (the crazy ex who doesn't understand Reed is in love, mostly because he doesn't understand it yet), we have Peyton reeling from tragedy as well as rape aftermath, and then we have Reed trying to figure it all out.

The ending? Perfect. I loved it. I loved how the story ended and I loved the epilogue. I so love an epilogue, especially a good one that gives readers a little bit extra you didn't know you wanted so much.

Overall? I would give it 4/5 stars. It's a great book, not too long, and it's entertaining enough to keep you going and wondering what is going to happen with these two as well as all of the secondary characters. I finished it in a day easily.

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