Brenda Hiatt

Well this was adorable! The ending felt a little rushed, but it could just be that I wanted the book to be longer. :) “Gabriella” is a fun, clean read that featured really likable characters. Brie and Dexter were both charming, and even Angela, who was horrid, made me laugh. The story also includes a sweet rescued kitten and some newborn puppies. You know, for when you need a story like that. Which I pretty much always do :). 4.5 stars.

Newly divorced Wynne Seally heads off to Aruba on vacation, taking advantage of the already paid-for trip she booked for her wedding anniversary, the day she discovered her husband was involved with another woman. "No Fear" is her new motto, and she embraces it by going ahead with the scuba lessons she had planned to take with her husband.

But on her first real dive, exploring a sunken ship that's a popular tourist attraction, she finds an expensive wedding ring and braves a moray eel to pick show more it up. It's engraved with two names and a date, and it's a Cartier piece.

The island's Cartier shop recognizes it and says they'll have the owner contact her. Fellow diver Ronan Gale tells her the names suggest it may be connected to a major murder case.

And then someone ransacks Wynne's hotel room. There's an attempt to lure her to a meeting out of the public eye. She gets a phone call from a famous gangster.

Suddenly her commitment to "No Fear" is being tested in alarming ways.

Wynne is a really likable character, a woman gradually realizing her own strength and independence now that she's broken free of her husband of twenty-five years. Her basic decency shines through without any false, goody-two-shoes notes. Her relationships with her grown daughters, who need their own little push toward independence, and with her mother, who thinks independence isn't nearly as good as reconciling with that cheating but prosperous husband, feel very real.

It's not a perfect book. The mystery is fairly well done, but about halfway through I asked a question that seemed obvious to me, but clearly wasn't to the characters, and my suspicious later proved correct. It is nevertheless a fun and satisfying story of a woman coming into her own, and reaching out for new adventure and new romance after a painful divorce.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher via NetGalley. show less

My real rating probably hovers around a 2.5, but this is one book I'm willing to round down for.

It's always disheartening when a book like this presents such an interesting, paranormal backdrop, and then promptly disposes it as something the adults of the story concern themselves with the details of, not the teenaged main characters. No, we get to sit through pages of football games and puppy dog eyes with only faint hollows of the supernatural making an appearance.

And of course, what type show more of YA book would this be if we didn't have a main character obsessed to the point of lunacy with our main heartthrob? I can at least give Hiatt some credit here - Marsha's obsession with the one-dimensional Rigel has some basis in the book's lore, giving it purpose. But that doesn't mean it makes for interesting reading, either.

I don't even know if you can call what this book has "lore", anyway. I mean, it has an okay basis for a supernatural, "out of this world" (if you will humor me) story. But a lot of it just seems silly, like Hiatt googled a few science-sounding words and threw them into her book in order to look well versed. Plus, the "powers" don't even make that much sense. Hell, the society that they try to introduce mid-book isn't even all that interesting, nor are their origins. The few shallow attempts at establishing culture last all of three pages before we are launched right back into Marsha's brain, who gives us more ample descriptions of Rigel. Is anyone surprised?

I really wanted to like this more than I did; the beginning made me genuinely curious about Marsha's past. But the mystery is dropped relatively early in, being made more obvious by the minute, and takes a sharp turn down when Hiatt decides to pretty much spoonfeed you the plot because hey, we have to make up for lost time and have Marsha (sorry, "M") become one with Rigel, spiritually. And, okay, maybe I'm a little peeved that Marsha's aunt didn't end up being the plot device I was one hundred percent sure she would be. But that doesn't excuse anything else in this book.

Maybe if the follow-ups were free, I'd probe into the series further and see if things pick up from there. But considering that book two is five dollars and its synopsis heavily implies that Marsha will not only continue her awkward flirtatious tirade, but with a different goddamn boy (so fickle is the heart of the paranormal YA protagonist!), I think you can count me out. show less

The only reason I purchased this book was because of all of the five-star ratings that I saw on Goodreads.
Maybe it was my high expectation but I found myself shaking my head at every new development, not in astonishment, but in disbelief that so many people thought that this story was amazing.
This is one of those stories where a potentially good plot gets chucked aside in favor of an insta-love, whirl-wind, "I just met you, but I cannot live without you" romance. Where every decision the show more protagonist makes revolves a boy and how it would affect her relationship with him. Where, when they are apart, she seems to not be able to function. Where she ignores her friends, who were her friends got ages, because of a boy.
And let's not get into the fact that she was painted as a plain, nerd - with acne and glasses - but was made beautiful (all the guys are now noticing her, no more acne or glasses) because of a guy.

I can't. show less