UNSEEN MESSAGES
Genre: Survival Romance
Author: Pepper Winters
Release Date: March 30, 2016
“There is a message for everything. From handwritten to verbal, seen and unseen. Messages exist all around us.”
But what if you don’t see?
What if you don’t understand?
What if, by ignoring the message, your life is never the same again?Estelle Evermore morphed from nobody to somebody overnight.
Galloway Oak put his past behind him and endeavoured to make his fortune using his trade.Two strangers.
One plane.
Multiple unseen messages.From sky to island, they find neither fame nor skills can save them. Stripped from society and left alone to survive the elements, the very task of staying alive outweighs all other needs.Until survival turns to desire.
And desire turns to danger.From New York Times Bestseller Pepper Winters comes a timeless love story answering the question of what happens when everything is stripped away.Standalone.
SPOILER FREE UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT
Don’t you hate it when everyone loves a book but you? Le sigh. This review is actually painful for me to write. Why? Because I adore Pepper Winters. I’ve read the woman’s entire backlist, so when I saw she was coming out with a secret project and revealed the cover to this book, I was beyond thrilled. Heck, I couldn’t wait to get my grabby little hands on it.
When it landed on my kindle, I dropped everything and began reading…
And reading…
And reading…
And reading some more…
Then when 2 days later I looked down at my kindle and realized I was only at 15% I began to get a little twitchy.
Now look, I don’t mind a long book. I devour Kristen Ashley books in 2 days and those books are typically AT LEAST 450 pages on average. But the length of this book? Well, it didn’t work for me so much. As a matter of fact, it dragged…. painfully so. I will go so far as to say this may have been the most long winded book I have ever read in my entire reading history. But there’s a difference between development and filler, and unfortunately I found over 40% of this book to be pure filler. The descriptions, the events, a lot of it never really went anywhere.
The first 15% is one giant false red herring because after everything that happens in it, the characters’ actions afterward were almost mind-bogglingly ridiculous. I just couldn’t buy it for the life of me. The writing is another thing that never worked for me. While some may find it lyrical, I found it to be full or purple prose and mundane and redundant inner monologue.
There.
Was.
A.
Lot.
Of.
This.
And also there was a lot of t…h…i…s.
I think that for this reader, it was just too much. A book has to be well balanced with dialogue and development, and I didn’t find that to be the case here.
I skimmed almost the entire second half and found that I missed almost nothing. In my opinion, this book could have been 40% shorter and worked much better. While I liked some parts, other parts I was bored out of my skull. The characters spend so much time in their head, it made my eye tick.
Every feeling and thought is described…
And described….
And described some more.
But even while there’s a lot of description, I found it did nothing to endear or connect me to their actions. There was just too many pages to fill in the spaces and the actual story began to fade out somewhere between the prose and redundant details. Some of the actions and situations the characters found themselves in were too far beyond the scope of believability for me. I can suspend my disbelief for fiction, but there were parts where I found myself seriously scratching my head in confusion. The ending was cute if not a touch too cheesy for my tastes.
This was different, yes. But for me, while I loved the concept of the story, it fell flat on the delivery. I’m sure I’ll be in the minority in my opinion and clearly many a reader really loved this book. I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those books you either get or don’t. Unfortunately for me, I fell into the later part. But I’m just one tiny opinion here, so read it and judge for yourself 😉
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