Abandoned by Booklikes

So I lost my mind a little bit this weekend and read all four books in the series which is probably going to color my reviews cause I know what is coming. This book really is around 2 stars, but I rounded it up to 3 based on books #3 and #4 which were pretty terrible. The strongest book in the series is book #2 honestly. Each of the books in this series deals with a Quinn brother.

This book really does a nice job of setting up the relationship between the brothers, how much they loved their parents, and them focusing on doing what their father wanted them to, helping to raise Seth, another brother that their father had just taken in. The romance between Cameron and Anna (Seth's social worker) did not work for me at all. This book was written in 1998 I think so you can definitely see a lot of the older romance tropes that authors for the most part have turned away from (Cameron is slightly alpha and doesn't listen to the word no from the heroine and just puts his hands on her when he wants to). The flow of the book was all over the place I thought and then Roberts throws in some magical realism that didn't fit the book at all. Unfortunately it is repeated in all four of the books and I was bored by it. 

"Sea Swept" follows Cameron Quinn who returns home after his father, Ray Quinn, is in an accident. Cameron has been living in Europe and racing boats. I guess one can make money at that though I am still baffled by it. When Cameron returns to Maryland, he finds out that his father recently took in a 10 year old boy named Seth. He and his brothers, Phillip and Ethan are all asked to help raise Seth in their family home. That means that Cameron and his brothers are going to have to rearrange their lives and defer in some cases their dreams in order to do this.

There is also a specter of small town gossip going around that Seth is their father's biological son and that he also killed himself. Dealing with Seth's biological mother who seems to have other motives means that the Quinn brothers have a lot of issues going on. Roberts throws in a romantic entanglement with Cameron, with Seth's social worker Anna.

I honestly didn't like Cameron this much. He reminds me a bit too much of other Roberts romantic heroes in her trilogies, the former bad boy made good and I wanted to drown him at times. 

Ray Quinn and his wife sound like loving and generous people. I have to wonder though at Roberts having Phillip and Ethan coming from Baltimore's inner city and both are white. It just read weird to me after a while. At one point I thought Phillip was biracial, but that isn't how he reads in his standalone book, so I wonder if that was what Roberts was going for in this book and just dropped it. 

It was heartbreaking to read about what Seth went through, but my favorite parts of this book was reading how Cameron, Ethan, and Phillip were there to take care of Seth no matter what. 

I actually liked Anna and thought she had great points to make about therapy and having Seth talk through what he went through. I loathed how she got shut down by Cameron and it was just never discussed again. Heck, that whole family needed therapy. I also have to laugh at a social worker getting involved with a man who she supposedly going to determine if he keeps custody of Seth. I just rolled my eyes about that whole conflict of interest thing and rolled with it. I didn't really get Anna and Cameron's relationship and thought that Anna was smart in shutting him down at times. He pretty much bullies her anytime she says no to him about anything. 

The setting of St. Christoper on the Chesapeake Bay seems very small town and sounds like an old fishing village that is going to be deserted in about 10 years or so unless something comes along to save it. 

The ending of the book was okay, I honestly was drawn more to the brothers' relationship than what was going on with Anna or Cameron.