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elenajohansen 's review for:
Arctic Wild
by Annabeth Albert
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The plot ended up being not quite what I felt the blurb promised, in that the crash and ensuing rescue was over so quickly, and the bulk of the book was focused on the mundane and civilized recovery. I thought the relationship was going to develop more in the wild, especially given the title of the book, but the crash is the inciting incident, not a major plot arc.
Setting that aside, this felt a smidge more formulaic than the first book in the series, especially with an age gap being one of the obstacles. Whether or not it's a "big" age gap is subjective (I feel like it's big but not creepy or insurmountable) and how well any given reader responds to the harping on it that Reuben does is going to depend on how they feel about the age gap in the first place.
I got tired of it.
But the real thing that got my blood up here was Toby and Reuben's families. Amelia, as the bratty teenage daughter, was a brat, but at least she came around and wanted her dad to be happy; Toby's family was consistently rude and awful and ungrateful. Not every minor character in a romance novel has to be likable, and I think his family members were a realistic level of awful (as opposed to being cartoon villains) but I hated the constant emotional self-flagellation Toby put himself through about how he needed to be there for his guilt-tripping, entitled family. They weren't worth it, and he doesn't really seem to get that by the end, so it was just frustrating.
Setting that aside, this felt a smidge more formulaic than the first book in the series, especially with an age gap being one of the obstacles. Whether or not it's a "big" age gap is subjective (I feel like it's big but not creepy or insurmountable) and how well any given reader responds to the harping on it that Reuben does is going to depend on how they feel about the age gap in the first place.
I got tired of it.
But the real thing that got my blood up here was Toby and Reuben's families. Amelia, as the bratty teenage daughter, was a brat, but at least she came around and wanted her dad to be happy; Toby's family was consistently rude and awful and ungrateful. Not every minor character in a romance novel has to be likable, and I think his family members were a realistic level of awful (as opposed to being cartoon villains) but I hated the constant emotional self-flagellation Toby put himself through about how he needed to be there for his guilt-tripping, entitled family. They weren't worth it, and he doesn't really seem to get that by the end, so it was just frustrating.