Friday, September 2, 2016

Blog Tour: Review of "Bleeding Hearts"

Hello again!  I'm having fun with stepping up my blog tours while I'm on editing duty for books and a short story.  Tonight is a mixed genre one called "Bleeding Hearts."  There is thriller mixed with romance and literary fiction with traces of natural humor.



As I've said with a few other books, I like mysteries where the points lead to a conclusion that doesn't make me sigh at the gaps in logic.  This one is not exactly a mystery, though I classify it as a character mystery, personally.  We open with a crime and backtrack through the steps that led to that and character development that results.  It is a character-driven plot about finding connections, but that's one of its strongest characteristics.


Cami (Camryn Lucks, friend of Emma Spade...  Does everyone have a casino name in this book?  That's beside the point.) is a slightly hard character to get used to.  As the story progresses, we see her emotional detachment from events and people come into play.  As a trauma survivor, I understand the need for detachment.  It's what one of my therapists called trauma-wiring.  I did, however, hope that there would be a more natural transition between the shell-shock and the end result.  It was hard to put myself in that character's shoes when I was used to her taking steps and then she did a bit of a long jump.  It could be that I'm reading too much of myself into this, since it took more of an adjustment for me to move between those elements of recovery.

The best aspect of the book for me was the even playing field that Dana gave the male characters.  Some authors bludgeon you with feelings about a particular character because they want you to feel a certain way about them.  (*cough*  Malfoy, Uncle Vernon *cough*)  In this case, Dana wrote characters who under most circumstances are no better or worse than others.  Except for knowing the end from the beginning, you can understand why one character is so appealing to Cami and when she has feelings for someone else, you can definitely see her same pattern of thinking, tempered with experience.

I won't put too much more, but thank Dana for letting me in on this story.

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