My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Choices is a romance which I would put in the New Adult and above category. We follow Lindy and Ricky through a couple of years of their life beginning when they are both just sixteen.
In Chicago Ricky is an out of control teenager, his mother is desperate to put a stop to this and asks if his Uncle will take him in and discipline him. Lindy is lonely, her mother died three years ago and her father has hardly spoken to her since. He’s not coping and Lindy is left on her own for too much of the time. She’s a straight A student who sets her own limits and works hard.
Uncle Nick enrols Ricky in the new school and soon he hears Lindy singing and is captivated by her voice. They become friends and are soon boyfriend and girlfriend, their devotion to each other gets them the nicknames of Romeo and Juliet but not everyone is happy about this. There’s one girl who had her sights set on Ricky and she’ll do anything to get her own way.
I was torn between a 3* and a 4* for this book. The storyline is pretty good and there are some very good emotional pieces within the book. The highs and lows allowed the reader to relax after intense scenes. But at other times the action and character behaviour was a little unrealistic, Ricky went from bad kid to good kid overnight and Lindy was surrounded by people who loved her wherever she went. I felt the book was far too long, 600 pages. For me there were too many over long descriptive passages and there were often information repeats, or conversations between a couple explained a second time with another character. The reader was told every detail, for instance “Diane, the movers and the moving truck left” this could easily have been “Diane and the removal men left”. As a reader I knew they would have gone in their removal truck, it didn’t need adding. I think the book could be slimmed down by checking for similar sentences. There is definitely room to get the book down to a more readable and popular size around 300 pages.
I liked the intense scenes and the young couple, I’d be happy to read more from them in a shorter more compact story.
This review is based on a free copy of the book which I won.
Find a copy here from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
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Rosie Amber 