Keeping Secrets
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Author: Lisa Eugene
Release Date: October 22, 2015
Is that how a little girl sits?
No, Daddy.
How should a little girl sit?
Shoulders back and tummy in.
And how should a little girl look?
Always neat and pretty
That’s my girl.Twenty-four-year-old Alexa Kennedy is beautiful, sharp as a whip, and at the top of her medical school class. She’s also been waging a war in her head for as long as she can remember. Depression. Hatred. Self-loathing. These feelings feed the pain inside her, fueling her quest for a perfection that she can never achieve.
In one life-changing moment, Dex Blakewell crashes into her world. Dex is funny, gorgeous, and irresistible. He chases away the darkness and fills her with light and laughter. An unusual friendship blossoms, making no demands or expectations.
Friendship turns into an unexpected love and a delicious passion. Alexa realizes that the only thing tethering her to sanity is their connection. But even Dex’s strength can’t keep her demons at bay forever.
When life overwhelms her, the outside world starts to mirror her inner turmoil. And when Dex discovers she’s been keeping horrible secrets, will she finally shatter or find a way through the darkness? Will the promise of love be enough to save her from self-destruction?
***WARNING: This book is for mature audiences and deals with topics and situations that some readers may find deeply emotional. That being said, I hope that many may find inspiration from these words. ***
The need I had for her was consuming, irrational. She was as necessary as my next breath, as vital. It was not only baffling, but somehow unsettling.
I’ve been a fan of Lisa Eugene’s since my first book of hers, Steal My Heart. And with each new book she’s released since then she shows immense growth as an author. Her romances are not ordinary, and I can appreciate that as a reader. Reading romance, after a while most books begin to blend into each other. Unless there’s a certain edge to them that makes them stick out. This book had that in spades. Lisa took on an incredibly raw topic and she managed to weave it flawlessly inside a romance. Now considering the subject matter here, that’s no small feat. And props to her for pulling it off as well as she did.
Alexa Kennedy is a final year medical students, well on her way to becoming a doctor. She’s motivated, driven, smart, and completely lost to the war inside her mind. She’s her own worst critic and she never fails to rip into herself. A highly competitive medical school with entitled students just looking to overthrow her potential position as a valedictorian and scholarship to the Medical student are just a few of the things messing with her head. Then a child in the oncology wing that she’s bonded with passes away and sends her into a tail spin
…only to come crashing into Dex Blakewell.
Dex is a successful businessman with no interest in women beyond one sweaty night between the sheets. But his word quite literary tilts on it’s axis when he meets Alexa. What begins as an unlikely friendship soon begins to turn into something much more. But both of them are keeping secrets. Secrets that have the potential of breaking the connection that they only just now formed.,,
Keeping Secrets was very different from anything that I would typically read. While the romance is a heavy element, what truly drives the story is Alexa’s “condition”. Lisa spares no detail in her struggle and truly brings the reader inside her mind. I loved that gritty little element to this book. I’m not entirely sure why it’s labeled as a dark romance, as I found nothing truly dark about it. There’s no graphic violence but you do get a graphic view inside Alexa’s issues (view spoiler). But for me that’s not dark. Realistic, absolutely. But not dark.
Alexa is a very broken individual, and while not my usual preference to read in a heroine, there was also something very endearing to her. You can’t help but feel for her and Lisa does a phenomenal job with character development to ensure that all readers will feel the same.
If you’re looking to step a little bit outside the norm of contemporary romance, this is the book you do it with. I absolutely loved that the author didn’t gloss over any issues. Her characters truly dealt with their issues in a realistic matter. The romance wasn’t instantaneous but it wasn’t too slow either. It was a perfect fit for the story and I loved watching these two fall in love. Of course in usual Miss Eugene fashion you get some super sexy scenes in here, but that’s just the icing on the already great story cake.
