Elle Keaton

Love - Limited Edition by Elle Keaton
Home in Hollyridge series #1. M-M romance. Dual POV.
It’s the holiday season but Rory Hoyle isn’t feeling cheery. Then he walks into a bookstore and is smitten by the owner. When Brett says he needs to walk Lulu the Labrador before closing, Rory invites himself along and Brett is charmed by the awkward young man.

🎧 I listened to an audiobook copy, narrated by Kerr Lordygan, who does a wonderful job with the two main characters and a couple of secondary. He’s definitely a voice I would listen to again although I admit to listening at 1.5 to match reading and conversational speed.

An insta-love charming romance with adorable pets to up the sweet factor.… (mehr)

I wish I DNF this book, to be honest, but the audiobook hooked me and I just… it was like a train wreck. I didn’t want to witness that, but I also couldn’t look away.

I had hope with the first chapter. Adam is a cop and he’s seen some stuff that haunts him. For a brief, brief moment, the author manages to capture this Noir-esq, gritty narrative. Unfortunately, they lose it in the weird transition that happens between the first chapter and the second. By the end of the second chapter, any redeeming quality that Adam had was soured by his horrendous ‘personality’, though I do use that term loosely.

Everything is disjointed. I’ve never seen such horrible chapter transitions in my life. In fact, I frequently went back in the audiobook to make sure that I hadn’t zoned out completely and missed something important. No. No. No matter how much I was staring at the wall and resisting the urge to drool on myself, the reality was that the author chose to end chapters in what felt like the middle of character development paragraphs and then abruptly start the next chapter.

Maybe character development is too hard for her. I mean, I get that it’s challenging and that most can’t cut it, but still… It’s sad that those throttling cuts were the only character development in the entire story and that each time they come up, the reader was left floundering and wondering what the hell was going on.

Let’s enter our love interest, Micah. He’s small town cute and comes freshly picked out of the Awkward section of the ‘Stereotypical BYO Character Catalogue’. He’s got anxiety issues that, for a moment, the author ALMOST managed to write believably. But then it just turned into meet-cute dribble. Micah is tall and damaged, has no idea how attractive he is and he (and I WISH I was making this up) fell into the lap of Adam in a coffee shop.

I thought this trope went out of fashion back with Meg Ryan in the ‘90s.

Anyway. Micah is, of course, cute and shy and hopeless. And, of course, he’s a tiger in bed. Because every emotionally damaged, anxious bundle of nerves is so super happy to take their clothes off and start humping the stockiest guy to come along.

Let’s just cut to the chase, because I could rip at this all day. Storm Season was a disjointed, jumbled mess with no running coherent train of thought and characters with zero likeability. And I’m saying all of this BEFORE the Russian Gangsters came into it. That was just the crème de la crème of topics that inexperienced writers fall on when they realise that they have no plot, not characterizations and no way to dig themselves out of their own writing holes.

By that stage, I was basically Stockholm Syndromed into finishing it. It paired well with lazy afternoons, covid-19 sleepless nights, copious amounts of wine and intense giggles over how bad a ‘novel’ could be.

Seriously, you got paid for this???? Honestly, I’ve read better fanfictions written by twelve-year-olds.… (mehr)

It’s a low angst, opposites attract, small-town romance supposedly with an enemy to lovers' theme, but it’s more that they just greatly annoyed one another. I really didn't quite understand the "enemy" part or why these two now, adult guys, seemed to still have their supposed "hate" based something that happened in high school. Adult Vincent is a real estate appraiser and high school shop teacher. He loves living in the small town he grew up in in Washington with his fifteen-year-old daughter, Romy, whose mom...Vincent’s ex-wife...took off for greener pastures and deserted them. Adult Xavier is a realtor, who returns to his hometown after about twenty-years of living in the city. Both men have had enough heartbreak so neither is really interested in a relationship....at least not with each other. The very first chapter of the story was confusing. We saw what could have been a murder or at best an assault...but was this the unsolved murder of the person whose bones are found in the present part of the story? Nothing was after said again about the first incident. Then there was the case of a missing girl that was never investigated. I expected a lot more from this author. I own and have read every series she has ever written up to this current one. This story does have some good “small town” characters, but overall, the town of Cooper Springs felt dull instead of charming or even eccentric. It’s unfortunate because I really did enjoy the two main characters and their romance when they decided maybe they didn't hate each other as much as they thought....and then there was the dogs that Xavier's Mom adopted. Good job Ms. Keaton for showing how lovable and how needful shelter dogs are. That was an extra star-worthy touch. If the story had only focused on the growing relationship between Xavier and Vincent, and the rest of the small town without the unsolved murder and the opening mystery that was never revisited or explained...I would have liked this story so much more. At least it had a Happy Ever After at the end...but it comes very suddenly. I won't give up on this series, and NEVER on this author. I will give book #2 a chance whenever it comes out.… (mehr)