that girl with a book

To my best friend who recommended me this book and I know is reading this review, I’m so sorry for the three stars. I fully considered lying and giving it a higher ranking but I decided that thatgirlwithabook needed to be a place of honesty and integrity so three stars it is. I love you though.

I’m getting harsher and harsher with my reviews of main characters. They need to make mistakes and screw up… but damn. So here, we have Petra Rose, bestselling author. She’s headed off to a writer’s retreat in a cabin by herself in some weird podunk small town. To be honest, the first few chapters before Saint showed up were a bit of a drag. Petra had a movie adaptation of her book done and the director cut one of the main characters from the movie, earning outrage and criticism from fans. A lot of her issues come from the criticism that she gets on her writing, and she spends a decent chunk of the book whining about how hard it is to be a writer. Colleen put a disclaimer type note in the beginning of this book to essentially say “Guys, this book isn’t about me or my experience as an author” which I found myself contemplating every other chapter or so.

Anyways, on to the juice. One eerie night, a hot cop shows up at Petra’s door. What a coincidence- the book she’s trying to finish has a hot cop! Anyways, Petra gets some inspiration from him, which inspires her to invite him back multiple times. Also, he’s married, and she knows it. All part of the allure to Petra, I guess. So he keeps showing up and they do some weird back-and-forth between roleplaying (?) as the characters from her book, Reya and Cam, and being themselves and having a good old-fashioned affair. At one point Saint shows up and plays out some kidnapping type scene and then shows up again later to rescue her. And this dumb hoe invites him back again. Get a grip, girl.

Mid-book we find out that Petra’s got a husband and two daughters she’s betraying with her affair. Crazy work. She spends the first half of the book wondering if Saint feels guilty for betraying his wife. Meanwhile, she’s cheating on her husband. Wow. Great. This was the most shocking part of the book to me. Yet again I’m a sucker for an unreliable narrator. We spend a lot of time with Petra and her guilty after that, yet she just can’t seem to pull away from Saint. It’s almost hard to believe she feels guilty about it.

Things start to fall apart when Petra tries to find proof the incident that made Saint first show up at her doorstep. She can’t find it in the newspaper, neither of the old dudes in town who apparently know everyone know who the hell Saint is, and Petra starts to get a feeling that maybe the random cop who showed up at her door to bang her out of her writer’s block isn’t really who he said he was. I mean, he did have a badge. What was a girl supposed to do?

Petra runs back to crazy neighbor Mari (pronounced Ma-ri) to ask what she saw that night. Crazy neighbor Ma-ri tells Petra that Saint showed up one night pretending to be a cop and paid her off to keep the secret. Petra’s PEEVED and runs out. She whips out the old Google and Googles her new lover, shocked when nothing turns up. Who doesn’t Google their men this day and age? Then she pays some scammy websites to find his real name. Eric something, a screenwriter. GROSS. I hate the name Eric.

She confronts him, sort of, and they do some weird dance around thing where he tries to blame her for “asking him” to do it, and she says “well I didn’t ask you to do ALL THAT.” Honestly, neither of them are in the right, they’re both kinda looney, and they probably deserve each other.

The next big plot twist is where we find out that Petra’s best friend Nora actually KNEW Eric/Saint and sent him to her doorstep originally to inspire her. I felt like this was an unnecessary twist. Plus, it gives Petra yet another person to blame other than herself.

I would have preferred if Saint came out to be a crazed fan or someone trying to put together the next movie adaptation of her book. He felt like an incomplete character to me. Also, some of the s*x scenes in the book are crazy. Particularly the one where Saint is outside Petra’s window. Honestly, Shepard (Petra’s husband) deserved better. Petra gives a high school girl who needs constant drama to feel alive. She’s immature. She definitely embodies an imperfect main character, but I wish that it had come out to Shepard and they got divorced. Plenty of time for Petra to be alone and write then!

I will say, Colleen writes a good tension between the two characters. If it wasn’t such a screwed up situation, it would have been a good romance. I guess that’s kind of her niche, screwed up romance. And evil men. Just like real life, honestly. Ugh.

Live laugh love,

girlwithabook