REVIEW: Coming Undone by Lauren Dane

Coming Undone by Lauren Dane
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Book Description: 

A new novel of "toe-curling" erotic romance from the national bestselling author of Laid Bare. 

After his parents' death, Brody gave up a promising career to care for his family. Now, with his siblings grown, Brody owns his own business, and for the first time in years he's alone. Elise has come to Seattle with her daughter to find peace. After years as a world-famous ballerina-and trapped in a marriage gone bad-she's looking for neither love nor attention. But she finds both in the handsome, honest man who befriends her with no strings attached.

Brody and Elise discover in each other the wild, physical passion they need. But it'll take a shadow from Elise's past to make them look beyond what they need-to what they truly desire.

I freely admit that I've read this series out of order...and haven't finished it. And while I will go back and read the earlier books in the series that I haven't gotten to yet, I WILL NOT read the newest book, Raven's book.

I don't typically star out with my reading issues in my reviews, but in this case, I can't help it. The book was going along swimmingly, I liked Brody, I like Elise, I liked Rennie...but there was one HUGE issue for me...Raven. She was a secondary character but I came to LOATHE her. I wanted to throw her off a cliff, into the ocean, bouncing off sharp pointy rocks on the way down. Oh, and did I mention that she's got cement shoes and falling into shark infested waters? I can't remember the last time I hated a secondary character this much. (Actually I can...Nan from the Too Far series by Abbi Glines). Raven was despicable, and my opinion of Brody dropped a little since he was blinded by her and it took him almost 80% of the book to catch on to the fact that Raven was toxic and needed to swim with the fishes.

Sticking with my theme of issues, while I did like the book (It's a sold 4 story wise), I had a few issues with the pacing of it. I liked the chemistry between Brody and Elise and the way things started with them and all of a sudden, the third time they spent time together, BAM! the end up in bed. I was left scratching my head wondering if I missed something. My other issue also deal with time but in another way....it was hard to gauge the amount of time that passed and what I thought were days or weeks were actually months and a year. That wasn't a huge issue, but it did bug me a little.

Overall, I really did enjoy the story between Brody and Elise. For them alone, I could easily have given this ★★★★. Once they got together, they stayed together. There weren't any breakups or running away. Brody fell in love with both Elise and her daughter and never had a moment where he wanted to run away from the responsibility of having kids. I really do love the Brown family and look forward to reading some of the other books (minus Raven's).

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