Abandoned by Booklikes

I hope this isn't the last book in the series, because this was a mess and did no one any favors. 

Yeah. I am ticked. I told my friend about this book while reading it in Honduras. He's gay and he said he still doesn't get why books and even movies still dance away from showing gay men in love. We still seem okay with women, and that's usually because of the whole male gaze and most of them imagining themselves with the women. I think she shortchanged the two characters in this one (Hayden and Luke) and it just made their "romance" look beyond ridiculous when we didn't see it, but hear about it vaguely, and then love happened (over a freaking two day period I think).

The other romances didn't do well either. We have Nyree's friend Victoria with her other brother Kane and their romance. And then James dumps in other couples over the previous series (we get Zora and Rhys again  and then Nyree and Marko again (seriously why?) and then Kevin and Chloe. We also get appearances by Koti, Kate, Finn, Jenna, and just freaking mostly everyone. This should have either have been Victoria and Kane's book with Nyree's wedding as a backdrop or better yet Hayden and Luke's book. 

I think that ultimately this one was a wrap up for the series and was too rushed. Too many characters, too much jumping around, and too many plots to get invested in to get pushed out on to move on to the next one. I couldn't even get emotional about Nyree and Marko's updates and wedding.

James also needs to decide what's she's going to do about Nyree's mother and stepfather, he's terrible and apparently homophobic but it's brushed aside and I was left wondering what the heck was going on. Rhys mono-longing about things got old. I don't care what he thinks about Luke and Hayden. 

The writing didn't work as I said or the flow because we jumped around too much and were given at times life changing news every five seconds. I think James was modeling this on her book, where she showed updates to her characters in one book, that one worked a lot better than this one though. 

The ending was a miss with me. Probably because you have some characters doing 180 on things, and then the big bad secret that Rhys was keeping was just found out in like 5 seconds. And I swear every five minutes some big hard man was crying which I guess I was supposed to be all how can a hard and tough man cry. Lord. I miss Cat Cat. That's all I got.