Reviews with content warning for Child death - Reckless

Reviews tagging 'Child death'

neekoshimmer32's review

emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

This book was my first Elsie Silver book (I’m reading out of order, I know). It was overall good, occasionally funny, but the tropes were not really my cup of tea. And yet, there were times where I really enjoyed them.

We follow our main character Winter (and her sister is called Summer, cue the eye rolling) as she accidentally gets pregnant by a bull rider, Theo Silva. In the first few, almost snowed in chapters, he seemed more so like his cowboy, small town, notoriously handsome rugged dude type. There are scenes of the actual bull riding (nice to see, though I’m still terribly unfamiliar with it) but otherwise, especially near the middle of the book, he felt just like any other guy. There was a time where the couple discuss just how ‘country’ Theo was and wasn’t, so that was a fun conversation, well sort of.

I’m not really much of a small town romance, accidental pregnancy,

ending in a proposal, more pregnancy in the epilogue

kinda girl. After our couple first meet, it felt like they just stuck together for several chapters on end (which eventually lead to Winter getting pregnant on accident). Personally, I wish we could’ve seen the couple apart just to process their initial thoughts about each other. The constant reminder that someone you like is around, for that long is surprisingly disturbing to my very introverted nature. Just reading about it exhausted me. Maybe Winter and Theo are extroverts. Or maybe it’s love at first sight?

We then fast forward to winter finding out and informing Theo.

Theo doesn’t actually find out, but seemingly he has a very bad response, which is our first conflict. That part was very realistic. I meant the reaction by winter, not Theo’s response.

. We also fast forward to Vivi, the baby, being approximately 6 months old (I’m not sure exactly), but most of the book involved Vivi being around. We saw just our exhausted winter was being a single mom.

Later she does get Theo and others to help, but being a mom is exhausting, I presume, so that was depicted as Elsie intended. Maybe some moms reading can relate.

I’m personally not big on babies being in my romance books, but Vivi was almost written to be perfect so it was alright.

Theo seemed like this ‘bad boy’ character who fell in love, and supposedly flipped upside down to finally settle down with Winter. He was a great dad, and seeing him talk to Vivi was actually adorable and is biologically making him more appealing. He does really care for winter, and that was shown through his actions, helping her out as much as he can. There were a couple of times he had funny lines, but somehow I don’t find the lines where other people in the room laugh actually funny.

One of the nicest things I saw (and could somewhat relate to) was winter feeling a bit insecure about her looks. She was more specifically concerned with her body post-pregnancy which I can’t relate to, but it was nice to get a peek into her head at this moment. Of course Theo (and any reasonable man does for their partner) does still love her, but I feel like men in books have not been able to answer this right for me. They always tend to love someone else’s body for what it does for them, and I didn’t like that sentiment.

The main downsides to this book was some bits of writing. Certain things tend to be repeated a few times, or phrases im not really liking tend to be used.

For example, winter is called icy and cold and couple times. That’s not only cliché as that’s in her name, but Theo hasn’t even seen any proof of her ‘iciness’ and I wouldn’t call a girl talking back ‘her being difficult’.

There are a few romance tropes which were also predictable but that was only around the start and a few times.

Overall, I still enjoyed this book. Tropes and personal experience-wise, im not the target audience but I love it. And the cover is stunning, like most in this series. Im going to continue reading this series (probably still out of order), but hoping I’ll like the next book as well, and better than this one.

Content Warnings