Aching for Always
By

TEST

Books, like relationships, can have deal breakers. Everything else might be fine, but one thing in particular just puts the brakes on. For Aching for Always, that deal breaker came in the first chapter when the heroine exchanged sex for money.

Joss O’Malley may have been engaged to that man, Rogan Reynolds, and it may have been for her floundering map business, but it didn’t end there. She’s staying a virgin until marriage, but has no problem doing anything else – including giving Rogan a BJ in his office so he’ll give her company $125 K before their wedding. But when she’s walking later, she sees a bizarre shower of sparks in an alley, and hits her head and is rescued by a strange man in an 18th-century costume.

That man is Hugh Hawksmoor, a man who came through to the future from the early 1700s to seek revenge against Joss’s father for killing his brother. The key to this – as well as another piece of revenge sought by one of Hugh’s companions – is a map made by Joss’s mother, who herself was from the 1680s before marrying Joss’s father. As the pieces fall together, Joss realizes that Hugh, Rogan, her father, and even her mother aren’t who she thought they were.

You see, the thing that’s painful about this is that besides that scene in the beginning, the rest of the book is pretty much fine. Nothing spectacular, but fine – a B-, maybe. And if you don’t mind that sort of sexual manipulation that Joss does in the beginning, you’ll probably enjoy this book. But I just couldn’t get past it. While we’re looking at flaws, I’ll also point out the confusing and poorly paced explanation of the time travel and reasoning behind it; the frequent shocking revelations that characters had to have been blind to miss; and a poorly resolved climax with tacked-on explanatory final chapter.

But the story itself was fast paced, interesting, and exciting. Hugh and Joss had chemistry and a connection, and I did like Hugh. He was generally a pretty good guy, and I believed his feelings for Joss and understood his motivations, even if I didn’t always agree with them..

I just couldn’t like Joss, though, mostly because of her bizarrely contradictory sexual morality. Aside from that, Aching for Always would have been a decent but unremarkable story.

Reviewed by Jane Granville

Grade: D+

Sensuality: Hot

Review Date: 02/11/10

Publication Date: 2010/10

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Recent Comments …

  1. excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.

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