Redemption by H.L. Laffin Book Review

Redemption by H.L. Laffin

Published by: Southern Owl Publications to visit their site, please click here. 

Publication Date: December 20.2017

Series Information: Redemption is book two to the Family Secrets series. 

Other books in this series include: Christmas Pie, book one published October 23, 2017. To read the Christmas Pie Review click here

Genres: Romance, Contemporary Romance

Formats: Ebook, Paperback

Pages: 350

My Ranking: 

Fire In The Sheets Ranking: 2.5 Getting hot with a little steam. This story contained mostly scenes where the characters get just to the moment of play then back away. The intimate scenes that are detailed are detailed and get a little hot. My ranking system is a little different from most, for more click here

Page Turing Ranking: 2 My ranking system is a little different from most, for more information please click here.

Where To Buy:

Amazon

My Review:

Warning, though I try my best to avoid this, all reviews can contain spoilers of some kind. If you would like to know just my overall opinion of the book, and otherwise go into reading it blind, please scroll down to my overall and would I recommend it section.

    I Voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

    Redemption is the second installment to the Family Secrets story line which takes off from the first book, Christmas Pie. I have to say, right off the bat I did not expect this story to take the path of redemption for Nathan and Donna’s characters as it did. 

    This story starts with our hero Nathan getting a phone call from the a woman needing to speak to him right away. Nathan tells her to meet him at his house after he gets off work. When she does she drops a little boy off with him clamming it is his son, a son who he thought had been aborted. To top it all off, this little boy, named Josh, is the very thing he had gotten into a horrible fight with his parents before their death and is the reason he stole a car and went to prison. Josh is the soul survivor of a car accident that killed his mother and grandparents on her side, and will not speak except to tell Nathan that his mother, Jillian, is gone. 

    Wow, what an emotional roller coaster for poor Nathan right from the start. When Josh shows up at his bachelor pad, he had just been thinking about how he felt when Jillian told him she had aborted their son. The tidal wave of shock, rage, and happiness knocks him off his feet even more than suddenly having a child placed in his care. Most of the time the father has a child he may not know about but to have a child that was thought aborted was something different. 

Excerpt form Redemption by H.L. Laffin 

    Donna’s arrival at Nathan’s house is not happy coincidence. The secrets of Donna’s recent past has her running to Nathan, hoping to hide from reality as well as get advice from her best friend. The appearance of Josh, however, makes her think Nathan needs her help more than she needs someone to talk to. During this romance, both characters find themselves healing from anger and pain through figuring out what best to do for Josh and taking care of him as a family. This pulls them together and creates a strong bond that both characters grow from.

    With that being said, I have to say that while the premise of this story was interesting, after reading Christmas Pie I was disappointed by this book. 

    Nathan often comes across as a bit of a jerk that has a lot of anger issues. There are so many place throughout the story where he will all of a sudden yell at the people in his life. Donna in particular seems to be the target of this unpredictable anger more often than others. At times the yelling is very strange and feels very out of place in conjunction to the rest of the dialogue. Because of that, I will say that this might have been more of a grammar and punctuation problem rather than an intended anger or mental problem with Nathan, but it is really hard to tell for sure. 

    Donna has a similar problem with yelling at people, like her boss, out of the blue. She also makes a comment to Nathan that she should knows would hurt him deeply. I found her to be a bit pushy and felt she was shoving herself into Nathan and Josh’s life a little to fast. While I felt this similarity made them able to stand up to one another and therefore compatible in some ways, it also made it hard for me to really like either character or root for them. 

    The other thing that really kept me from getting into the story was the grammar. The punctuation marks really confused me in the narrative, which is what leads me to wonder if my feelings for the characters actually stems from this issue. There were so many exclamation marks used at inappropriate times that it caused me to have to reread lines to try and made sense of the tone or what exactly was being expressed. I also felt untrusted as a reader to remember facts about the characters since information about them and their past was repeated several times throughout the book. 

    On a final note, I will say that I like how this unexpected little boy brought Nathan and Donna together. They face their past like a family and are able to grow from it. Thanks to this, Josh is also able to get past the trauma of what happened to his mother and grow as a happy little boy.

Overall: 

    I think the premise of this book is very interesting. I was not expecting the twists and turns this story would take. I was also not expecting the secrets to be what they were. I liked how the little boy brought everyone together and how the characters grow from the experience of helping him with his loss as well as raising him. However the strange anger of both main characters really stopped me from connecting to their romance. Also, grammar errors and the repetitive nature of the story made it really hard for me to get into.  

Would I Recommend It:

    As interesting as the secrets of the family turn out to be and as much as I like the premise of this love story being so centered around the child, I’m afraid I have to say no for this one.