The Waves

Well, the cover caught my eye and the description sounded really promising...yay for a unique premise for a quick summer read. I've enjoyed following the author on Instagram and was interested to try out her work.

Well, her writing style itself is stellar. She can take a page of prose and make it pop up in 3-D.

However, the plot and the characters fell flat for me. The plot was just personal preference; I like a bit more meat to relationships. The characters, though, just didn't ever really steal my heart. Dillon's really juvenile and annoying, and Liam was SO focused on the physical that I really got impatient with him (I mean, he can't even take time to tell her why his hand hurts when a storm is coming in, and I didn't get why that was some kind of secret...etc). The crux of the book is them being stuck alone on an island in bathing gear while waiting for rescue and I got really tired of the whole moaning-about-how-sexy-she-looked issue. I don't root for relationships where the #1 attraction is the sexiness factor, because that's fleeting, and a couple who marries only for sexy is likely to fall apart when wrinkles appear or when tragedy leaves scars. There was also a page-long kiss that involved teeth that just really grossed me out.

What further kept my rating on the “okay” level was the serious handicap in commas and apostrophes, which got very distracting, and the dozens of crude terms and the two outright profanities. I don't know that I'll pick up another by this author.

I'd recommend it to someone who wants a light “beach read” novel that's sexy without having sex scenes, and who doesn't mind some language.