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My Review:Title: Spinning Out
Author: Lexi Ryan
Published by: Indie
Release Date: May 3, 2016
Format: Kindle Book
Pages: 462
Genres: Romance, Contemporary
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2018 #LetsReadIndie Challenge, Lenoreo's 2018 Beat the Backlist Challenge, Lenoreo's 2018 New Adult Challenge
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iBooks ✩ IndieBound
My rating:
Blurb:Once, the only thing that mattered to me was football—training, playing, and earning my place on the best team at every level. I had it all, and I threw it away with a semester of drugs, alcohol, and pissing off anyone who tried to stop me. Now I’m suspended from the team, on house arrest, and forced to spend a semester at home to get my shit together. The cherry on my fuckup sundae? Sleeping in the room next to mine is my best friend’s girl, Mia Mendez—the only woman I’ve ever loved and a reminder of everything I regret.
I’m not sure if having Mia so close will be heaven or hell. She’s off-limits—and not just because she’s working for my dad. Her heart belongs to someone else. But since the accident that killed her brother and changed everything, she walks around like a zombie, shutting out her friends and ignoring her dreams. We’re both broken, numb, and stuck in limbo.
Until I break my own rules and touch her. Until she saves me from my nightmares by climbing into my bed. Until the only thing I want more than having Mia for myself is to protect her from the truth.
I can’t rewrite the past, but I refuse to leave her heart in the hands of fate. For this girl, I’d climb into the sky and rearrange the stars.
SPINNING OUT is a sexy, emotional novel of 100,000 words. It is first in the Blackhawk Boys, a series of standalone novels.---THE BLACKHAWK BOYS. Football. Secrets. Lies. Passion. These boys don’t play fair. Which Blackhawk Boy will steal your heart?
2.5 stars — This rating does not reflect the writing whatsoever…I actually highlighted a lot of this book, b/c I think Ms. Ryan writes beautifully and presents things in an interesting manner. Unfortunately, while I’ve enjoyed the one other book I’ve read by her, I don’t think I have the patience for the types of stories she prefers to write. Which is mostly to say that I have problems with moral ambiguities, and quite honestly, that’s a large chunk of what makes up this book, and consequently what bothered me about this book. I will note that at about 60% I just gave up and started skimming to get some answers. What’s funny is that I would catch on certain passages, read them, and I even cried a bit…and yet I didn’t really like the characters, or basically any of the decisions they were making. So how Ms. Ryan managed to drag feels out of me, I’m not sure I will ever understand. I will also note that I ended up having a very interesting conversation with my husband about the book, and cheating and friendships and all that shiznit…so it did provoke thought. I just don’t enjoy that kind of thought I guess.
So what went wrong. Well, first of all — one of my button issues is cheating. I HATE it, and it would take a REALLY SPECIAL CASE for me to handle it in a book. It’s just a personal thing. And while what happened in this book is not the normal cheating, it was a bunch of technical edge case stuff that just wasn’t cool with me. It wasn’t a love triangle in the normal sense, b/c you always knew who Mia was meant to end up with — Arrow. But that’s not who was her boyfriend for a chunk of the book, that would be Arrow’s best friend Brogan. Now I totally get that this shouldn’t be a surprise given the blurb…but I guess I expected a different set of edge cases than the ones I got. I’m so sorry I’m not making sense, but I really don’t want to do spoilers. All I can say is that I wasn’t OK with how any of the three of them handled the relationships they all had with one another. I get that we’re all human, and that they’re younger, but even if there was no physical cheating based on technicalities, there was a shit-ton of emotional cheating IMO, and that’s just not cool with me. And I didn’t appreciate the way the author conveniently arranged events to almost let people off the hook. There was guilt, but I just didn’t feel the regret I wanted to…I didn’t feel the consideration for friendships and the like. And I didn’t like some of the behavior that surrounded that whole complicated thing, where excuses were made. GAH, I’m going to stop, b/c this is not helpful to anyone.
Anyways. So it wasn’t just that whole thing. I also didn’t appreciate the circumstances surrounding the accident. The mystery, the coverup, people NOT DOING THE RIGHT THING. GAH! NO!!! People DIED! I just can’t even with the decisions made there. And there were just so many convenient excuses that tried to make it OK, but it wasn’t OK for me. I won’t get into the who (though I had a feeling early on what the twist was going to be), but it involved drinking and driving (and now that I think about it, multiple cases), and that is a personal button for me as well. So I didn’t handle ANY of that well either.
So those are the major plot elements that DID NOT WORK FOR ME. On top of that, I was conflicted on our characters. Mia was yet another heroine that we are hit over the head with how beautiful she is, but I’m not entirely sure what else these boys were attracted to. Which is not to say that I didn’t like her, more that she just wasn’t a standout. And if these boys are going to go gaga over her, I appreciate it when more than her physical beauty is expounded upon. But here’s the conflict — I thought she had other good qualities, I just wasn’t sure if these boys saw that before they were obsessed with her. She was hardworking, smart, and cared for her friends. And in some of the later past sections I started to see more of the connection between Mia and Arrow, and I felt their chemistry…so there was that.
I was initially wholly unimpressed with Arrow. He was straight up mean to Mia, and while I’m assuming it was to push her away, it didn’t always feel that way. The pot shots he took were just not endearing. I also could not understand what his friendship with Brogan entailed, and just had a hard time grasping their relationship, and what I can accept. But there were other times where he really tugged at my heartstrings. He was a complicated character that wasn’t all bad, but it’s hard for me to articulate his characteristics apparently.
And then there’s the secondary characters…also mostly conflicting. I was actually really intrigued by Chris, but I don’t think I can handle these kind of angsty reads anymore. C’est la vie. And I loved Mason, but not Bailey. As for the parentals, mostly unimpressed. Also didn’t understand the change in Arrow’s father…but I might have misunderstood Arrow’s initial misgivings.
*sigh* I’m just going to stop. This is a long review that says nothing. Just that I don’t like moral ambiguities, and I need my characters to be more clearly likable to really enjoy a book. Ah well. My own fault for not DNFing earlier when it was clear it wasn’t going to work for me.
Yuck, this one sounds not cool. 🙁