Procure Dont Cry For Me (Rebel Ridge, #2) Expressed By Sharon Sala Rendered As File
didn't like the first half of the book, so I would give that astar, I loved the last half and would give it astar, So, overall this is astar read, I especially love the depiction of the Walker family, In so many books the family just doesn't exist, In these books they show what a support a real family is,
Quinn Walker is a vet who came home brokenyears ago, He has had a difficult time putting his body and mind back together and prefers his own company or that of his family, A very strong supportive family, He gets a call from a guy in his old unit that Conrad is going to be released from the hospital and has no where to go.
He immediately volunteers his home, Mariah Conrad has a busted leg and PTSD, She also has deep feelings for Quinn, who was her lover during their tour, but didn't contact her after he returned, Her head is just not right and she can't let this time together turn into what it was before,
As Mariah works hard to overcome her physical challenges, Quinn works to renew their old relationship, Mariah is enveloped by Quinn's family and for the first time in her life feels what a family really means, Her feelings for Quinn are too much to resist and they become lovers again, Mariah had flashbacks, one that was triggered by shooting a rogue bear, She also hears voices in the cave and a ghost helicopter in the night and fears she may be losing her mind,
Bad guys are on Rebel Ridge also, Someone is poaching and there is a new owner of the old mine up to no good, Quinn is taken prisoner and Mariah rescues him in a really great last half of the book, I love this entire series, but this one was exceptional and Mariah was one of Sharon Sala's best heroines ever, I reread this pretty periodically, This seems to be my year for books with amazingly strong women vets, Mariah is astonishing. She and Quinn make a tremendous statement about resilience, I loved Mariah and Quinn, I absolutely enjoyed watching Mariah mostly work through her history in the war, PTSD and injuries. It's not an easy thing and I always enjoy a story about a war vet coming to terms with being back in the regular world and finding their way to happiness with the person they are after that experience.
This should have been a great book for me, I loved that this was a female vet and that the two main characters had a history, The situation of them having a relationship in a war zone and losing touch while Quinn came home to deal with his own after war issues even worked for me.
I loved that even injured Mariah was kinda a bad ass, She didn't need to be saved in the way most lead females do especially in a suspense, She kicked but and saved the day a couple of times herself, I love that the author went this direction,
The story as a whole was okay, but the suspense aspect felt forced, It didn't flow at all with the amazing potential of this story, The suspense had almost nothing to do with the story at all until aboutin, The author randomly put us in the head of this bad guy early in the book and he had nothing to do with the story at that time.
It felt abrupt and forced every time, Add in this so cookie cutter stereotype bad guy and it began to ruin a really good story for me, Make that worse by the bad guy who has obvious mommy issues from the start, Yeah I got that before we end up in a creepy sex scene with him and a prostitute pretending to be his mom, I'm sorry I'm not a prude about sex scenes and I've even read some that are bad guys and even the kind that are scaring to the character, but this one did nothing for the story.
It was so unnecessary and added absolutely nothing but a creep factor to the story for me,
I really wanted to like this story more, But the constant abrupt changes to this irrelevant bad guy felt forced and ruined the story for me, DNF
I had to recheck the release date and was shocked to see, This is a SUPER boring “romance” that I could NOT trudge through any longer, I thought the book was just really dated and its era of being relevant was over making it a hard book to enjoy in, Its onlyyears old, therefore the book is just mind numbingly bad,
I am apparently in the minority with my assessment, but I stick by myStar,
The two main characters and “love birds” were not relatable or captivating, I need at least one or the other, They hooked up a LOT once upon a time when doing tours together in the military, Now theyre both out and surviving traumatic war injuries, The h was a foster kid and has no one, so our H takes her in to recover in his isolated cabinhome,
This all sounds mostly fine except, . . the two main characters are terrible! The h whines about foster care, but quick to throw out dont pity me, and is in her head about the H most of the book, and is just as dudly as can be.
She brings NOTHING to the table, Her only unique quality is being an orphan,
The H isnt much better! Hes a mountain hillbilly who likes to hike and be alone, Hes obsessed with capturing an injured bear and has night terrors, Thats the extent of his interestingness!!
Now we have two weak characters who circle each other on “does he/she love me Or is he just being nice because Im an orphan/is she just here bc she literally would be living in the streets otherwise This dance goes on and on and the chemistry is as hot as a blown out candle.
I do not regret saying ENOUGH and returning this quickly to the library, This book was reviewed for sitelinkMusings of a bookworm
OMG I loved this book!! it took me on an emotional journey that had me smiling the whole time.
I really enjoyed how the treads of the plot came together and that the obvious routes were not always taken in the plot, I read the first book in this series and it left a very high bench mark for this one and boy did this one not only reach it but surpass it.
Mariah was
the kind of women you want to be, strong and capable but soft too, Quinn was the kind of alpha male that get you a little hot and a little scared it all the right ways so together they were just explosive and the icing on this very luscious cake was we got to catch up with all the friends we made in bookand I will be first in the cue for book.
Good romance of two vets with PTSD and their life on a ridge in Kentucky surrounded by mean bears, drugs and missing hikers, This was my first Sharon Sala book, Probably my last, too. Though I usually like a good romantic suspense, and I have soft spot for military heroes thanks to Suzanne Brockmann, this book did not do it for me.
Let's start with the hero, Quinn, He was a good guy, but kind of old fashioned, If my grandma was trying to be hip, she'd really like Quinn, He cooked but also encouraged the heroine to cook and become better at it, he was protective of the heroine but kind of paternalistic, like having her sit on his lap a lot, and he complimented her often but did so by calling her "pretty girl," which, I'm sorry, totally creeped me outthough Gram would probably like itlike, "No pretty girl, that's not true.
" YUCK. I think if someone called me that I'd think they were a serial killer, not bf material,
Quinn's motivation in the story got off to a rocky start for me, Quinn gets a call a few chapters into the book notifying him that a former fellow soldier, Conrad, who's been wounded and rehabbing at a facilty a few hours from him, is being released, but has no family or money.
Without hesitation, Quinn decides to step in, so he arrives on discharge day to bring his fellow soldier home to live with him, It's a big surprise to the reader that That did not ring true for me so it seemed like more of a quick and dirty plot device than careful character development, So I wasn't that impressed with good ol' paternalistic Quinn,
The heroine, Mariah, is pretty kickass, She is suffering from PTSD, and she thinks she's going crazy which bugged me because that could've been cleared up with a conversationI hate that, but on the up side, she saves the day twice with no help from Quinn.
In fact, she singlehandedly saves the day in the end, so I have to give this author points for that, That's where she got two instead of one,
The villian is totally cardboard and onedimensional, Completely, utterly without complexity. His motivation to be a bad guy is supercreepy, too, Super creepy, based in a violent experience that is not problemetized nearly enough in the story, In fact, we're sort of encouraged to have more sympathy for the perpetrator of that violence than for the villian/victim himself, He's completely "bad" with no redeeming qualitities, He's a superasshat, sure, but the "reason" for that is presented clumsily and not convincing, In fact, it's downright unsettlingnot in the way where you're like, "wow, this author dealt with this supercreepy topic by skillfully taking me to places that were really uncomfortable"I'm usually okay with that kind of read because it's clear the author understands how disturbing it is.
That's the point. But this author was not skilled in doing that, so much so that it made me wonder whether she even knew how disturbing this situation is.
Like, does she get that I just thought the way she handled that was ignorant and insensitive and clueless.
Total turnoff.
Speaking of onedimensional and stereotypical characters, Quinn's family was too MarySue for me, "Don't you worry your pretty little head none, Mariah, you're one of us now, We's take care of our own, up here on the mountain, Ayuh. " Basically the hero's family is saltoftheearth poor peoplethe kind that "ain't got nuthin' but luv, an' that's good 'nuff for our simple hearts, girl, " And the villian's family serves as a clunky, amateur version of the foil: Poor, lazy, goodfornuthin' mountainfolk trash, Zero complexity.
Overall I did not connect to the characters in this story, At all. Part of the reasonand it's a really big partwas the headhopping, I've read books where it's not my favorite, Nora does itand does it welland Susan Anderson does it, which I can also live with, Still not my favorite, but the reason they do it well is that they change heads once or maybe twice in a scene and they make it really clear who's got the POV now.
I've also read books where the authors do this poorly and that's annoying, But this book! OMG, this book had absolutely no regard for consistent POV, NONE. So in some scenes, literally from line to line you'd be in a different character's head, I guess I'm thankful to this author for showing me that, wow, I don't connect at all to any of the characters when this technique is used.
I suppose in the grand scheme of things this could be considered an omnicient POV, which is rarely used in genre fiction these days becausehelloit's so much less engaging! I just hadn't known how bad it could be until reading this book.
One unfortunate byproduct of this omniciant POV was that the rogue bear, who causes trouble for Forest Ranger Quinn in the beginning of the book, HAS A POV! Seriously, we're inside of the bear's headand not like Dean Koontz takes you into the head of a golden retriever read that in thes at some point, and clearly it was so well done I still remember the book!but we are in the head of an injured bear.
Talk about distancing the reader, Bleh. I felt like it was lazy writing because the author tried to up the suspense by showing us the bear moving more toward people, Ready to kill! dadadunnnnnn . Kind of like a movie, But for whatever reason, books can't use the same techniques as movies, at least for this reader, I need to experience the scene from one character's POV to connect with her or him, I just couldn't connect with the bear,
One last thing, which also made me think of my grandma: There was like all this god and praying stuff in the climactic scene.
I was literally flipping back to previous sections of the book going, "Jeez, is this book an inspirational How did I miss that" So I don't think it was, but there was sure a lot of faithtesting in the end.
The problem with that is there was no discussion of a faith conflict in the rest of the book, so from a story persepctive, it was an element from out of left field and didn't work at all in the overall story or characterarcs.
So all in all, the book was very marginal, I kept reading I really don't know why, I won't read another one, though I do find it at least mildly informative to read poorly written books because you can see the skill that talented authors employ seamlessly.
So that's worth something. .