Running from Romeo by Diane ManninoMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Book Description:
Emilia King is entering her senior year at Santa Barbara University. For the past three years, she lived in the library – doing what she knows best – focusing on her studies and forgetting her past…a past that has forever changed her life. But this year marks a new beginning…
Logan Prescott is not only the hottest guy on campus, he’s heir to a billionaire hotel fortune. Emilia knows he’s trouble and should stay clear of him. But his notorious good looks and piercing blue eyes make him simply irresistible – especially when he’s quoting her favorite literary works.
Intrigued by Emilia’s innocence and resistance to his charm, Logan discovers she’s a challenge he simply can’t resist. Getting involved with him is dangerous, but running from him may be impossible.
This book could have been really good. The premise sounded great…right up my alley…exactly my type of book. I love NA books and the description of this book screamed at me. I couldn’t wait to start it.
Unfortunately, that was the end of my excitement. The book started out ok. But I quickly found I had some issues. According to my kindle, this book has 833 pages. Now, I’m not scared of long books. I actually prefer long books to shorter books that have cliffhangers or abrupt endings and sequels. I would rather get the WHOLE story in one book. However, that wasn’t to be the case with this book. For the record. I gave this a good shot. I read 161 pages. That’s 11 chapters (plus the last chapter to find out how it ended). That was 30% of the book (not counting the last chapter). I gave this a shot. It just wasn’t the book for me.
Lordy lordy, this book was wordy! This wouldn’t have been a huge issue if the book hadn’t been so long. But it was long and consequently the wordiness was overwhelmingly obvious. Here’s an example:
That’s just one paragraph to show what I’m talking about. Just reading that paragraph, I felt like I went from reading a novel to reading a travel brochure. Now, just in case it was me, imagining things, I ran this paragraph by a writer friend of mine. She agreed with me and said it could easily be cut down to “Josh Harding, Tyler Irwin, and their two roommates live in a four-bedroom house just blocks from State Street in Santa Barbara's downtown." And honestly, I didn’t need Josh and Tyler’s last names. I couldn’t help feeling like this book would have benefited from more editing. Or, this author comes from a research background and did what I would do in a research paper and cover my bases with details so that the reader didn’t have any unanswered questions. But in the end (or 30% rather), I was wading through a sea of excess words and I barely scratched the surface of the story.
Another complaint (related to the wordiness) was the songs. Don’t get me wrong. I love how songs and books can go together. And I love it when songs are quoted in books (when done right) but there were so many in this book, that they lost the impact on me. I think the full song quotes combined with the wordiness led to me skipping & skimming, especially the song lyrics.
Bryn…Emilia’s best friend. At first, I liked her. Then Emilia made a point of saying Bryn was maternal toward her…multiple times. And after that, she sounded more like a mom than a friend. And in some cases that mix is fine, but it didn’t work for me here. She sounded older and more of a mother lecturing her child than well-meaning friend expressing concern for her bff. I just got turned off when Bryn entered any scene.
I have to address the ending. Even though I didn’t make it through the book, I did read the ending. And I hated it. The biggest reason…IT HAS A CLIFFHANGER. I really hate cliffhangers. And this was bad because the author spent 800+ pages getting them together and then at the very end (literally the last page) they break up. And I have a real problem with that.
In reality, the story wasn’t bad. And the writing was pretty good. I just couldn’t get through the sea of words to get to the story.
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