The Writing Rose

The cover and the blurb led me to believe this would be a western contemporary story, but the actual storyline is far different from expectations. Even the writing style is quite different to the blurb, leading me to believe the writer did not write the back cover blurb.

While I enjoyed the idea of the story, I felt the author left a few bits out and added some info that just didn't need to be there. It wasn't needed to progress the story, and appeared to me to just pad out the story to get a greater word count.

The individual character development worked for me some of the time and frustrated me at other times. I couldn't quite understand Elisa's motivation for swearing off men. Almost a decade prior, a college boyfriend hurt her when he announced he was gay and she's still sworn off men. Ok, I can understand part of that, but why be hurt for almost 10 years. It alludes to her not having dated since and mentions she went to a Christian college, but then with a complete change of character she thinks about having "wicked sex" with Brody. The images the words were creating for me initially just didn't gel. Christian collage, spurns men then to wicked sex in a heartbeat...

Similarly for Brody, I could understand he was hurt by a divorce, but then couldn't understand the reasoning for why he'd be attracted to Elisa but keep pushing her away. In reality, yes the scenario works for me, but the way the character was written just didn't have me believing him all of the time.

The writing style seemed to change from chapter to chapter and at times I was bored with the sentence structure used and other times intrigued. It was like the author had been brainstorming ideas and keeping the writing simple, but then forgot to go back and re-edit some of it.

I persevered because I really liked the plot and wanted to have a great read.

I wasn't aware this was the third book in the series as it didn't say that in the opening pages. There was mention of another 2 books with similar names, but didn't state they were book 1 and book 2. So when I started the book I thought it was a stand-alone and it can certainly be read as such.

It's an interesting story, with some interestingly written parts, but there are also some you would skim over.
[b:Along Came Trouble|17860851|Along Came Trouble (Trouble, #3)|Erin Kern|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1369819592s/17860851.jpg|21871729]