Author: Brittainy Cherry
Kindle Edition, Kindle Unlimited
Alex and Oliver are a musical duo composed by twin brother brothers. They are at the top of their game and are a success in the music world. The two brothers, tough identical in appearance, couldn’t be more different in personalities: Alex is the life of the party, an extrovert who everyone seems to like. Oliver is the silent, broody type that people even consider anti-social.
They are at a party one day and Oliver definitely wants out of it. He decides to leave and Alex tags along. There’s a car accident and Alex dies. The whole world, including Oliver himself, seems to blame him for the premature loss of his brother.
Some time passes and he’s trying to get back to singing on stage, but backs out of a concert at the last minute and hides out in a bar, where he drinks himself to oblivion. As he is there, he meets the bartender, Emery, who recognizes him, since she is a fan. While she is trying to not serve him any more alcohol, disgruntled fans that were in the venue for the concert he didn’t show up to arrive at the bar and they are obviously talking about the event. Oliver hears it and starts a fight with one of them. Emery helps him get out before the paparazzi get in, closes the bar and drives him out of there.
Emery is struggling with financial problems and is not having an easy life. She’s estranged from her family, including a sister who was extremely close to her. At that moment, she had been recently fired for her job as chef and is trying to make ends meet with the money she makes as a bartender. She’s raising her five-year-old daughter alone, her rent is past due and she has no idea what they are going to eat the next day. But she is a nice woman and she takes the poor man to her apartment, where he immediately pees on her plant and faceplants himself naked on her daughter’s bed.
Helping Oliver causes Emery to lose her job at the bar and Oliver decides to help her, hiring her as a personal chef. This close proximity between the two helps a friendship blossom and the attraction is there, so we all know where this will end. Two broken souls that connect and help each other heal.
I liked the romance, but I didn’t like how it was developed. We hardly see them really interact. For almost half the book, Oliver still has a bitchy girlfriend who he can’t seem to get rid of. I understand his reasons for staying in the relationship, but it felt that it took too long for the new couple to establish themselves as such.
The struggles Oliver goes through with the loss of his brother are really well written into the story. It’s hard enough for anyone to go through such a loss, and I can only imagine how hard it can be to do so in the public eye, especially when everyone seems to think that “the wrong brother died”.
I also loved the relationship that developed between Oliver and Emery’s daughter, Reese. It’s hard to write little kids and Reese is spot on. Her reactions and the things she say are not only funny but age appropriate. I hate when I see 10-year-olds in books behaving like toddlers and toddlers who belong in Mensa… She’s this funny little kid who likes and does things that a kid her age likes and does.
Now, I have a bone to pick here. There is a plot whole that drove me insane in this book: there is a flash back to five years before, where Emery and her sister are attending a meet and greet with Alex and Oliver. The two sisters are super fans of the duo. One of them is pregnant and her water breaks all over Oliver’s shoes. They are mortified, but the two boys are very nice and gentle and Alex even jokes that they could name the kid Alex, or even better, his middle name… REESE. I kept waiting for Emery to tell Oliver that it was her and her sister that day, but she not only doesn’t say anything, but she says she would have loved to have met Alex who she definitely did. That irked me to no end…
There is also one point of the plot that is telegraphed throughout the book in relation to Emery and her father, but when it finally came to light it was so… meh. I was disappointed. I wanted a better resolution for Emery’s conflict with her parents.
All in all it’s a good read, I even got teary-eyed in some points.
Possible triggers: rape/substance abuse/ depression/verbal abuse / death of sibling
