Title: Hard to Fall
Author: Marquita Valentine
Series: Take the Fall #4
Makes no sense
Thank you to Marquita Valentine, Loveswept, and Penguin Random House for allowing me to read this novel in exchange for an honest review.
Very honest.
Everyone has individual reading tastes. This one was definitely not to mine. In fact, I hated it. None of it made any sense.
I’m going to give a few positives before I completely shit all over it. One, the cover is awesome. Super sexy and looks professional, not like it was pasted together in five minutes on Photoshop. Two… Well, Evangeline seemed nice. Her husband was sort of a dick, but she was kind and considerate.
… Yeah, that’s all I’ve got.
All right. *cracks knuckles*
I seriously considered rating this two stars, but because a few of the issues I have with the book were in some way acknowledged, addressed, or excused by the end, half-assed or otherwise, I’ll give it three for not being as terrible as it could have been. *shudders at the thought*
First, overall impressions. I couldn’t have taken this book seriously even if I had liked the characters, because the writing was…not good. In my opinion, it read like a teenager’s creative writing assignment in comp class. Not sure how to describe it, but the words shallow, flippant, and disjointed come to mind. There was no finesse, no sophistication. Like someone’s free-write notebook had been barfed all over my screen. It was three-quarters dialogue and one quarter exposition or thought process, mostly the latter. Very little scene or setting descriptions; we’re pretty much left to our own devices as far as what places looked like, and because I’ve never been to North Carolina (let alone Charlotte), a firehouse, or a political function, and only once, very briefly, to an animal shelter, I was clueless. Books are supposed to take me to places I can’t go or haven’t been. This book took me nowhere. So onto the characters.
Hayden. Look… In the romance novels I read, I never, ever want to see either the hero or heroine have sex with anyone else. Ever. If the hero was a playboy in the past, fine, but I’m interested in the now, in the relationship he builds with the heroine, and the very last way I want to start a romance is seeing the hero fuck some slut (I speak crude because the scene was crude) because he’s too immature and undisciplined to keep it in his pants. “Oh, boo hoo, I haven’t had sex in three months, how can I possibly resist this strange woman I’ve known for five seconds? Oh, dang, she’s married? Maybe we should have had a quick conversation first. Oh, well.” No wonder his dad had no faith in him! The only reason that scene could possibly be important to the story is as a character witness…and why on earth would you want your hero witnessed as such? It is not endearing.
From that moment on, I hated Hayden, and I may have had a grudge against the book.
Oh, Saylor. Oh, honey. I wanted so much to like you. We seemed to have so much in common… We’re both geeks, both socially awkward, both considered weird by most people. But your decisions went from bad to worse until I wanted to just reach in and smack some sense into you. By your own account, you were only a bit tipsy when a black-out drunk Hayden proposed to you (seriously, how could you not realize he was that drunk?) and you went right along with it, marrying a guy you literally just met a few hours ago, because you have abandonment issues and other insecurities that you should have seen a professional about a long time ago. Sure, there was something about the movie Yes Man and resolving to say yes to something you’d otherwise say no to, but that was just an example of the half-assed excuses I mentioned earlier. (“Hmm.. If I include that they were influenced by that awful movie, that totally makes their getting married reasonable, right?”) Let’s be real here—you loved the idea that a man would be bound to you, and therefore unable to leave you. But then when he woke up and had no idea who you were, you chickened out and avoided telling him the inconsequential fact that he’d married you. Legally. You fricken hypocrite. Then you proceeded to dick around for far too long, avoiding this guy you were oh-so-eager to marry, even when he decided he liked you and wanted to date you. If you’d really regretted marrying him, you should have just been like, “Sup, we kinda did this stupid thing, can we get an annulment?” But no, you wanted him bound to you, so divorcing him never even crossed your mind. Finally, finally, when you stopped wasting my time and both managed to be in the same place for longer than fifteen minutes, you think it’s a good idea to let him screw you, unprotected, and still not tell him you’re married.
It was about at that point that I wanted to be done. But I read on.
Naturally, because Saylor and Hayden had spent so much time not together, when they did have that date, they realized they had deep feelings for each other. I didn’t buy it. Then, at long last, and only because she didn’t have a whole lot of choice, she admits they’re married. But hey, lookie there! That’s okay, because Hayden’s father had ordered him to marry or run for senator. If he did neither, his father would somehow ruin his career as a firefighter. Just…whatever. So they decide, “Eh, we’re not in love, but the great sex is enough to hold a marriage together, right? And we can always get divorced later. Yeah, let’s be legal fuck buddies to make the senator cram it up his crapper.”
And I was supposed to like these people? No wonder the divorce rate is so high!
How deluded was Hayden to think he’d married under his own steam? Um, he was drunk. You know, skewed judgment, impaired memory, and all that. He was vulnerable, and Saylor took advantage of that. So Hayden didn’t decide anything. In fact, I don’t think he made any of his own decisions throughout the book.
No, wait–he did decide to fuck that slut.
Yeah. Anyway.
Then there’s another secret-that’s-not-really-a-secret-because-it’s-in-the-blurb: Saylor’s biodad is Hayden’s father’s political enemy!
*gasp*
She’d been so worried about Hayden hating her for not telling him that they’d married, and was granted an astounding reprieve because their already being married happened to make Hayden’s life easier—in fact, it gave him everything he could possibly want—I can’t believe, then, that she’d double down on the chance of alienating him by keeping her parentage from him, too. (Just kidding, I can believe it.) She knew he wouldn’t like it, knew her options were 1) let him be mad at her now but give her the benefit of the doubt because their relationship was so messed up, or 2) willingly, knowingly, lie by omission to him for a while, let him be really mad at her later, and pretty much guarantee a divorce. Just fricken tell him already! A supposedly smart, nerdy girl like her would see the practicality in getting it over with…but instead she decides to be a coward and let the tension and drama build. Not that Hayden didn’t deserve her deceit—I mean, his reasons for staying with her were equally self-serving.
*sigh* I will say, however, that Hayden proved he could be mature when he heard her out instead of jumping to conclusions and banishing her from his life.
But they continued to make bad decisions. Among them was Hayden not immediately telling his wife that he was being investigated for arson. That’s kind of a big deal. I think he wanted to “protect” her from worrying, or something dumb and misplaced like that.
And that whole mess with the OBGYN didn’t make any sense. Apparently Saylor’s appointment was two months ago and she missed it, but they couldn’t get a hold of her to reschedule, and then Saylor thinks she has an appointment now? How can someone have the wrong date of an appointment by two months? Don’t most offices confirm appointments the week before to avoid this very issue? Regardless, she knew when she got the last shot of birth control, and it’s a biannual thing, so I assume that means every six months…so shouldn’t she have been able to do the friggin math and realize—anything! I’m so confused. If she’d gone longer than six months since the last shot, shouldn’t she have been worried about having unprotected sex with Hayden? If she’d gone longer than six months since the last shot, shouldn’t she be on the phone with the clinic asking WTF? If you’re sexually active and responsible, birth control isn’t something you procrastinate. On the other hand, if it had been only four months and the office hadn’t been able to get a hold of her about the recall, shouldn’t she still have noticed something was wrong? I don’t know anything about biannual birth control shots, but if the batch of shots she’d gotten hadn’t had the right components to be effective, and therefore wouldn’t have done jack squat for her, wouldn’t she have started having periods? That would have been a huge red flag. No pun intended. (Later, I discussed this with the nurses in my family. They laughed. A six-month depo doesn’t exist. They only know of shots given every three months.)
And what drives me crazy is how unnecessary all that confusion was! I shouldn’t have had to try to make sense of it, because Saylor’s getting pregnant had absolutely nothing to do with the story! It had nothing to do with the plot and nothing to do with character development, because neither she nor Hayden were conflicted about it. Well, she hesitated for a minute, but doing so was out of character for the girl who’d always wanted a family and made a living taking in strays. She hesitated mostly because she wasn’t sure Hayden would like it. But sweetheart, by the time there’s a baby in your belly and you’ve decided to keep it, it doesn’t matter a whole lot what he thinks. If he’s down with it, cool, no prob. If he doesn’t, goodbye dumbass and hello divorce! Regardless, their offspring should have been saved for the epilogue.
As far as the other characters… Hayden and Saylor’s besties, Evangeline and Hunter, were okay, I guess, even though something rubbed me wrong about Hunter. Senator Walker’s motivations were murky and he seemed to change his tune. And Hayden’s mom? If she was strong enough in character to call her husband’s shit during that brunch, she would never have allowed him to browbeat their son into a life he made very clear he didn’t want. The press seemed to get wind of stories when it was convenient. Saylor’s mom and biodad, however… I was confused about what exactly went down with them throughout most of the book, especially the last half. I needed some exposition to provide me with a linear explanation. It was kind of like the OBGYN situation; I had a hard time putting the pieces together and making sense of it. But I’m not even going to get into it…because I am just done with this book. I just can’t. I think I’ve made my feelings clear. The only thing that made sense about this book was failed birth control + lots of unprotected sex = baby. But it was irrelevant, of course.
But I have to say, what bothers me the most is…why did that driver flip Hayden off on their way to the lake? WHY? (Hayden probably cut him off. He’d totally do something like that.)
