Review: Breathe Into Me

Summary

How did my life get so broken?  It’s a question Lacey St. James asks herself every day.  Stuck raising her little brother in a trailer park while she works a dead end job at a grocery store, she has a stalker ex-boyfriend, a bad reputation, and no way out. 

And then, she meets Everett, who changes her entire existence.

Everett is an outsider who’s house-sitting his family’s mansion off the coast, and for reasons Lacey can’t understand, he’s completely transfixed by her. He seems determined to show her that life can offer more than she’d ever hoped for, if only she believes in herself.  She desperately yearns to trust him, but what happens when she finds out that everything he’s told her is a lie? 

Rating & Review

Breathe Into Me ... where to start ... okay. First of all ... after reading the book, I think that the blurb on the back doesn't do it any justice. At all. It also has some info that felt ... off to me. I read the summary a while back and I didn't bother reading it again before I started this book because hey, if I thought it sounded good then, then it will still be good to me now so there's no reason to re-read it until after I'm done with the book. Which is what I did this time. And I'm glad that I did it that way because there is some info on the back that is misleading and it totally ruins a surprise! But now that I've brought attention to the back of the book and some of what I think is weird, you won't be able to NOT read the blurb now. You've just ruined a surprise. Are you happy now? Anyway ... in no way does this actually impact my overall thoughts on the book but it was on my mind, so I thought that I would share it. 

Now, I love a flawed character. I go on and on about them all the time. It's mostly because flawed characters are the best. If you are reading a book and the main character doesn't make you think, "Thank goodness that isn't me" then they aren't flawed enough. I think that a perfectly flawed character will be one that you think "Thank goodness that isn't me" and then the author adds one more flaw in order to turn your thank goondess comment into, "Oh, shit". I want an Oh Shit character. At first, Fawkes did really well with her main character, Lacey. She took Lacey to Oh Shit Town but then instead of stopping there, Lacey was dragged through a couple cactus bushes in OST. Lacey became too flawed. She became broken. Instead of me seeing this main character as someone who could overcome her difficulties, shortcomings and down right travesties, I saw her as someone who had been shattered. There was no way that this character could redeem herself. I want to see that redemption. I want to see someone pick themselves back up after being dealt a crappy hand in life and I want to see them succeed. I want it to give me hope. But this was just sad. I have no problem reading a novel that is sad - the characters are sad, the town is sad, the pets are sad, and everything ends in heartbreak. But that isn't how I took this novel to be. I think that it wanted to be happy in the end and it just couldn't get there for me.

The writing was pretty good. After I got through a rough patch in the beginning where things just weren't interesting, it picked up and I found myself looking forward to snatching it up and reading a bit more. But I did find myself questioning ... everything. Mostly things about Lacey's character. Man. I just won't leave her alone, will I? I'll cut to the chase and just say this ... the main character was good at certain things that weren't let on in the beginning. It felt like it was just thrown into the book like, "Hey, she's going to be doing underwater basket weaving ... guess what?!? She's a world champ!". It was just weird and it felt forced.

You know, these things may not bother anyone else. Maybe I'm being a little sensitive or nit-picky. It's a pretty good book though and it's worth you giving a shot if for no other reason than to just tell me that I'm full of it and you like the cactus in Oh Shit Town. 

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