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A review by katyanaish
Blue Smoke by Nora Roberts
3.0
***3.5***
I'm torn between rounding this up or down, but for now we'll say down to 3.
I feel like ... this book just took soooooo long to set up. We spent the first half of it following the heroine from 11 years old to now (30-31, I believe). And I know we got important stuff - how the villain had intersected her life, without her realizing - but I just ... I suppose I feel like, rather than ramping up the suspense, it actually ramped it down a bit. It's just hard to carry tension across a 20 year span, with 3 encounters.
And on the romantic side, it suffered from the same. Poor Reena, not only was the villain intersecting her life, but the hero was too. Bo just kept seeing her, and missing her, and being obsessed with this Dream Girl.
I get the parallels - Bo was obsessed with her for nearly as long as the villain was - but I'm not sure what the message there is. What is the takeaway? That Reena was such a tremendous person that she inspired a murderous stalker and an obsessed lover? Or... that life is so random, an accident of circumstances brought evil into her life, but also love?
Anyway, that's a tangent... well, sort of. Because that's also half the book. And that's the problem. We spent soooooo long actually getting to the NOW that we didn't have long there. I wanted more time with Bo and Reena together. I wanted more of an encounter between Reena and the villain - I feel like when it finally happened, it was a 2 min thing, with most of it offscreen because we flopped to Bo's POV.
I loved Reena. I loved her family. I liked Bo, and I feel like he's a good match for Reena ... but I would have liked to see more. Their relationship kind of all happened in, what, a week?
Also, I want to give a heads-up for folks: there's a really nasty rape sequence in here, and rape is a recurrent theme. The villain isn't just a firebug, he's a rapist. It was tough for me to read, particularly through the nasty sequence. And I ... I guess I felt like we just didn't need it. I already thought the guy was a sociopath, and he'd been threatening rape with Reena in his creepy stalker calls. I didn't need to see him rape someone. In my head he was already that guy, and that was enough. I suppose that's also why I chose to round it down.
But overall I enjoyed the book. It just wasn't as great as I think I've come to expect with Nora Roberts.
I'm torn between rounding this up or down, but for now we'll say down to 3.
I feel like ... this book just took soooooo long to set up. We spent the first half of it following the heroine from 11 years old to now (30-31, I believe). And I know we got important stuff - how the villain had intersected her life, without her realizing - but I just ... I suppose I feel like, rather than ramping up the suspense, it actually ramped it down a bit. It's just hard to carry tension across a 20 year span, with 3 encounters.
And on the romantic side, it suffered from the same. Poor Reena, not only was the villain intersecting her life, but the hero was too. Bo just kept seeing her, and missing her, and being obsessed with this Dream Girl.
I get the parallels - Bo was obsessed with her for nearly as long as the villain was - but I'm not sure what the message there is. What is the takeaway? That Reena was such a tremendous person that she inspired a murderous stalker and an obsessed lover? Or... that life is so random, an accident of circumstances brought evil into her life, but also love?
Anyway, that's a tangent... well, sort of. Because that's also half the book. And that's the problem. We spent soooooo long actually getting to the NOW that we didn't have long there. I wanted more time with Bo and Reena together. I wanted more of an encounter between Reena and the villain - I feel like when it finally happened, it was a 2 min thing, with most of it offscreen because we flopped to Bo's POV.
I loved Reena. I loved her family. I liked Bo, and I feel like he's a good match for Reena ... but I would have liked to see more. Their relationship kind of all happened in, what, a week?
Also, I want to give a heads-up for folks: there's a really nasty rape sequence in here, and rape is a recurrent theme. The villain isn't just a firebug, he's a rapist. It was tough for me to read, particularly through the nasty sequence. And I ... I guess I felt like we just didn't need it. I already thought the guy was a sociopath, and he'd been threatening rape with Reena in his creepy stalker calls. I didn't need to see him rape someone. In my head he was already that guy, and that was enough. I suppose that's also why I chose to round it down.
But overall I enjoyed the book. It just wasn't as great as I think I've come to expect with Nora Roberts.