Personally, I found the characters a bit 1-dimensional: the posh kids at Bristol Uni, the love-of-my-life hero with his 'jade-coloured' eyes - for what is supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime passionate love, there's no real chemistry or heat between our protagonists so it's difficult to buy into the central relationship around which the book is built.The main character's motivation for withholding a traumatic event from said 'love of my life' just doesn't ring true to me 'she's been raped by his best friend but she doesn't tell him because... she's afraid he might commit suicide - what?? We’re given an insight into Catherine’s thoughts and you really do feel for her and those around her. We learn that Catherine is in hospital as she is unable to speak since ‘it’ happened. Her family and best friend visit her but nothing seems to help. Of course with this comes an array of objectionable characters and their whims and fancies and a life far removed from reality, certain characters ( well portrayed ) got on my nerves!! Big Little Lies meets 13 Reasons Why in this dark and suspenseful debut from a stunning new talent.

Him Series by Sarina Bowen - Goodreads

God, I think this is just a ramble. This is most definitely a contender for my book of the year. I absolutely bloody loved it. Such a journey we go on, one we are made to go on whether we want to or not but mainly because Catherine is just that damn beautiful inside and out. You want her to speak again, you want to make everything ok for her and her family and mainly, more selfishly, you want to know the truth. I found the characters hard to connect with though. Lucian and his friends are an elitist and snobbish club of rich and privileged people that Catherine never really quite fits into. Yet some are drawn to them like moths to a flame. And while Catherine wonders what her life would have been like had she stayed with Lucian, I was wondering how different her life with her husband, Sam, could have been had she been able to let Lucian go. To be honest, Sam was the only person I was able to muster up any kind of sympathy for. This book, then, is both the story of a life derailed by abuse and a study into the ways abusers control their victims. It took Davies until he was 51 to go to the police which, he notes, made him “five years older than my dad had been the last time he molested me”. While his father, who was now in his 80s, wasn’t charged on account of his Alzheimer’s – it was felt he would be deemed unfit to plead – the CPS affirmed Davies’s version of events. “I had what I needed,” he reflects. “The document from the CPS said they believed me, not him.” Davies says that the writing of Just Ignore Him wasn’t merely an exercise in healing. “Above all,” he writes, “I have set out to tell you the things you don’t know about me, in the hope that one day, perhaps, you will feel able to tell someone what they don’t know about you.” Elle writes romantic suspense and erotic contemporary romance for various publishers. She loves strong heroines and sexy alpha heroes, and just enough heat and danger to keep things interesting! The death of Davies’s mother from leukaemia looms large, not least because we learn that her husband neglected to tell her, or their children, that her condition was terminal. Decades later, he found a letter his mum had written to his father from hospital in which she shared her frustration at her worsening symptoms. Within a fortnight, she was dead.Written as a follow up for “HER”, HIM is a poetry and prose collection focusing on the voice of men, their undelivered feelings, unrecognized strengths, loud silences, neglected complaints, and need for love. It's a pity as there is something interesting at the centre of all the (melo)dramatics: questions of female shame and undeserved guilt could have been explored with more emotional intelligence - instead they get subsumed beneath a narrative that seems to be trying too hard to pull off twists and thrills. Disappointing. So this is a trope I think is becoming more and more popular in recent years. You've got the group of priveliged friends who come from money. You've got the one who's never fitted in.

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Or can they? When Wes’s nosiest teammate moves in upstairs, the threads of their carefully woven lie begin to unravel. With the outside world determined to take its best shot at them, can Wes and Jamie develop major-league relationship skills on the fly? In a world where good men fall in the shadow of bad men and fingers are often being pointed at them, Pierre focuses on changing the narrative, speaking to misunderstandings, and unmasking their hearts.Theakstons proof 5 was this one and I loved it for its considered engaging characters, the beautifully done past/present vibe and it's strong emotional core.