Title: Reckless (The Kingston Brothers #2)
Author: Bethany Winters
Genre: Romance
Publisher: Amazon/Self
Heat: 3 Flames
Rating: 2 Hearts
Synopsis via Goodreads:
Wren
Never feel, never fall.
Four words I tell myself to protect my heart from the pain I know all too well.
I learned my lesson the hard way.
Promised myself I’d never allow anyone to hurt me the way she did.
Now I’m falling and I can’t seem to stop it.
He’s dangerous.
I’m broken.
He fills the missing pieces until all I feel is him.
And I’m the sucker stupid enough to let him do it.Levi
I’ve always wanted what I can’t have.
Family, freedom, love.. him.
I’ve wanted him for as long as I can remember – the broken bad boy with the sad eyes and the tortured heart – but like everything else in my life, it’s not that easy.
His past will tear us apart.
My lies will break us beyond repair.
This love will send us both to an early grave.
Ask me if I give a damn.
Wren Kingston is mine.
And it’s about time he knows it.
This is a full length, dark high school romance with themes some readers might find offensive. It is book 2 of 3 in the Kingston Brothers series but can be read as an interlinking standalone. PLEASE NOTE: This book is M/M. Books 1 & 3 are M/F.
Review: I …. I don’t even know how to rate or review this one. I really don’t. On one hand, it was so utterly and completely, ridiculously OTT, that it requires a strong suspension of disbelief to read it. On the other hand? I couldn’t stop reading it.
So, as you can see from the publishers note above, this is meant to be a standalone. It’s not. At all. I get why it’s marketed that way, as people don’t want to alienate readers, but it really shouldn’t be. I was fairly irritated reading it as a result of so much missing information from the previous book. I almost DNF’d it more than once.
As is the theme of this blog, I stick to mainly the m/m genre in my reading. Sometimes that varies, but not often. The first book in this series is centered around a m/f pairing, so I chose to trust that I could skip it easily. I couldn’t…
That said, this book was recommended to me by a follower on Instagram, so I decided to check it out. From the blurb, it appears to have that emotional component that I love and I figured as a standalone, it’s worth a shot.
Right off the bat I’m hit with all of these references to the previous book. Events that have happened, people who have died, gone to prison, you name it. I spent the better half of the book feeling like I was the new friend in a group struggling to piece together all of the information. I wasn’t even 30 pages into it and had already been hit with numerous references like this. So, why did I keep reading? Good question. …
Answer? Levi & Wren. Childhood friends to lovers. My favorite trope. Their chemistry was off the charts and I really wanted to see what happened between the two of them. I really liked the two of them as a couple. I like the alpha personalities they had, but still able to be vulnerable with each other.
He feels like home and I need more […] “Are you mine?” He laughs lightly at that, slowly pulling back until his eyes hit mine. “I’ve always been yours, Wren.”
He wants my heart? He’s got it. The fucker.
And then it became this soap opera like trainwreck that I literally could not look away from. I mean, this takes place in high school. These kids are eighteen or younger, yet they read like some sort of covert operatives sometimes. All of them carry guns, arrange hits or kidnappings, I mean, it’s… I don’t even know what it is. And yet, I could not stop reading it. It confused me to no end.
So, that said, it’s really hard for me to rate it. I’m going middle of the road, 2 or maybe 2.5, because it did keep me reading, so that’s something, but it’s so ridiculous that it’s hard to find any credibility in it whatsoever. I read for the relationship and emotion though, and that’s something that it did have, so I’ll give it that. Not enough to make me swoon or cry, but it was enough to hold my interest. Entertaining. That’s a good word for it I guess.
This title is part of the kindle unlimited library and available for free.
Purchase Link | Amazon
