A review by booksabrewin
Dark Cherries by Eve Bradley

1.0

Allie was picked up in a drunken stupor on the side of the highway where she had given up on any form of self-preservation. Her savior seemed willing to take her in even without having truly known her. He was willing to let her sober up and walk away the next morning. But the longer he spent with her the more intrigued he was by her. That was when he offered her a proposal she couldn't turn down: pretend to be his girlfriend and meet some shady men and earn $10,000. What is a homeless girl to do but to accept the offer without care. It is only after she jumps feet first into the offer that she comes to realize that it comes with a lot more danger than she would have thought. Between her budding feelings of attraction for the three men that she shouldn't feel and the other men who want her dead, she may have made the wrong choice when she allowed her angel to save her.

Lord have mercy on my soul. This book was all over the place. First it opens on a homeless woman drunkenly stumbling along a highway and some man just pulls up beside her and says, 'hey babeh wanna ride?' (he didn't really) and she just... gets in the car and goes? What in the world? Then she goes home with him despite her having asked him to take her to the airport and just... accepts this is fine. Sure. Why not? When she wakes up the next day all sober she meets two more of the trio and still is not unnerved really. She doesn't hit the door and peace out. She sticks around. They offer her a way to make easy money and she goes along with it. No questions about what the catch is or why they are willing to give her $10,000 to act like another person and go clubbing. Nope. Then she starts sleeping with her "angel" and feels guilty about wanting the other guys too. But Shawn says, 'go do ya thing, dollface' and she jumps at the chance. No suspicion or questions. I am not even going to touch on the rest of the story because that was a cluster too.

None of what I read made any sense and it made even less sense when I got to the end as they throw one more mystery into the mix. What do you mean she has memory loss? Why? For what reason? What happened? Who in the--I just--help. Just help me. Help me understand this mess.

I know my review is not as analytical or helpful as it normally is when I try to review a book. I tend to try to offer some advice to the author on ways to improve but I am having an incredibly hard time with this one. I will say that some of the drama and intrigue was good. It is what kept me from DNFing the book. But there was too much going on and too many twists and turns. Too much acceptance from Allie. If she was meant to be played naively and like she was an airhead it would have worked. But you can't portray a character like a street savvy woman who just... accepts things at face value. That is not how a woman would survive on the streets. It made it all very unbelievable, unrealistic, and fairly corny.

The saving grace for the book is that I can see the meat and potatoes of the story and think it could be good, but there was so much fluff and so many inconsistencies that it was hard to enjoy the read. I will likely try the second book in the series and see if maybe that one will be a little better than the first.