This is going to be hard to write. I love Cecilia Gray and even her new book Drawn was different but exciting, this one however just didn't do it for me. To be honest I have not read the Jane Austen series in quite some time so maybe I just need to go back and re-read but I don't think that's it. Most of Cecilia's books grab me no matter the order I read them in!

Here are the ups and downs for this one.


First the downs so I can get this out of the way! I just don't like Emma in this one. I vaguely remember reading about her before and I don't think I had any problems with her but this Emma in THIS book is a complete and utter disaster, and not in a fun or quirky way. Emma has everything and I do mean everything, and even though she doesn't have the best self esteem I just couldn't feel for her. She texts her friends at the beginning of the book and types that it's an emergency. The emergency is that she would like her friends to come over and help her with getting some dogs and cats adopted, awesome cause in my book! But, she wants to set up two of her friends and gets disgruntled and thinks the ENTIRE WORLD Is coming down when another guy shows up. Also, the way she treats Knight just kills me. He's such a sweet guy and it's like all she wants is to have a cute guy on her arm as a trophy, not because she likes him! Argh...


So.. enough about Emma. As we move on through the book, sadly not much was happening. It's all about Emma's plans and where she wants her friends to be and how. I was nearly 50% into the book when stuff finally started happening. I don't normally DNF books but... I was really having to push through this one. And again to be completely honest if this were not Cecilia Gray I may have DNF'd it. There is just not enough plot here.


Fortunately! About halfway through things did start moving along. Emma actually started, sort of coming out of her shell and things go much better. There wasn't much of a character arc so I feel like if Emma is in Cecilia Gray's next book that she is still not going to be my fav character but at least something was going on!


All in all it sort of felt like Cecilia didn't write this. And maybe that was my problem. I have Cecilia gray on such a high pedestal that there is no way that even she can reach it in EVERY book. I still love her and her stories but this one left me short of expectations. Still a good story but not her best.

3.5/5