The Wall of Winnipeg and Me by Mariana Zapata

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Title: The Wall of Winnipeg and Me
Author: Mariana Zapata
Published by: Indie
Release Date: February 29, 2016
Format: Kindle Book
Pages: 673
Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Sports Romance
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2018 #LetsReadIndie Challenge, Lenoreo's 2018 Beat the Backlist Challenge
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ IndieBound
My rating:

Blurb:

Vanessa Mazur knows she's doing the right thing. She shouldn't feel bad for quitting. Being an assistant/housekeeper/fairy godmother to the top defensive end in the National Football Organization was always supposed to be temporary. She has plans and none of them include washing extra-large underwear longer than necessary.

But when Aiden Graves shows up at her door wanting her to come back, she's beyond shocked.

For two years, the man known as The Wall of Winnipeg couldn't find it in him to tell her good morning or congratulate her on her birthday. Now? He's asking for the unthinkable.

What do you say to the man who is used to getting everything he wants?

My Review:

4 stars — I loved so much about this book, especially the characters and the amount of emotion I felt.  Like, I can’t even begin to describe to you how much this book made me feel.

And honestly, I would have rated this book even higher, but there were a few things about the writing style that just weren’t to my taste.  Mostly it was that the book felt wordy I guess…like, particularly surrounding the dialogue parts.  I tend to be a bit of an impatient reader, and so when there was quite a bit of internal thoughts going on in between each piece of dialogue, I would find myself reading ahead and *just* reading the actual dialogue to maintain that flow and find out what was going to happen, and then I would flip back and read the bits in between.  It’s just a personal taste thing, I find I lose track of what the characters are discussing otherwise.  Not sure if that makes sense.  Obviously all books have this to some degree, this just felt…a bit more extreme I guess.

This book was also just a single POV, Vanessa’s, which worked fairly well in general and really helped me to get to know her.  I do tend to prefer dual POV books, but it’s not a requirement for me.  Most of the time I was OK with this, but there is a part of me that desperately wanted a peak inside Aiden’s head, especially since he was such a tricky character.

Honestly, Aiden was a hard one to figure out.  At first I wondered if he was on the Asperger’s spectrum, swear to god.  Eventually his interactions settled into a bit more of a normal pattern, but I can’t help but want to know if he has a social disorder or something…  I mean, I get that he’s damaged, but even with that I wanted to know what made him tick, because his behavior was seriously extreme.  But those are the cons of single POV.  My heart did ache for him and what he went through and what we learned of his past.

I both loved and got annoyed with Vanessa.  She. Was. HILARIOUS.  I seriously adored being inside her head sometimes b/c she just made me laugh so much.  She was such a strange mix of characteristics — sassy as all get out, endearingly eager, hardworking, caring and sensitive…but also seriously thick at times, which made her hard to love.  I mean, it made sense b/c of her f’d up childhood, and how it damaged her ability to trust.  But seriously, after a certain point her fear and avoidance and almost willful ignorance got tiring.  I did love how uninhibited Van was in her pleasure when Aiden would do certain things…but on the flip side I felt bad that she constantly underestimated him.

This was a RIDICULOUSLY slow burning romance…super super duper slow.  But because of that we got to see the relationship build up slowly, and that allowed me to really trust their connection to one another.  And even though it took the whole book to get there, I really felt their chemistry at the end.  It was almost a friendship book as well, because their connection went that deep.  There were so many good moments between the two of them.  I think my favourite was the whole section surrounding the Christmas present Van got for Aiden…I just about cried.  I felt ALL the emotions, and I could picture it so clearly.

As for secondary characters, I loved Van’s relationship with her BFF Diana: hilarious.  And even though we only got to see a bit, I enjoyed her relationship with her brother Oscar as well.  But it was her friendship with Zach that totally stole the show.  Can I just say how much I loved that there truly was no romance there at all, just pure friendship?  That was really refreshing.

So yeah, a bit of a mixed bag, but overall a serious win.  I’ll be checking out more from this author for sure.