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Be All (2013)

by Marie Wathen(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Marie Wathen

series

All

review 1: New Adult, Romantic suspense, with very steamy non-sex scenes. Whew! I actually had to read back to check to make sure that she was only describing a look, or a hold and not even a kiss or sexual act.There's a lot going on in this one. Best advice is to just hang on and enjoy the ride. Although this is part 1 of a series... so there's a cliffhanger.SPOILERS!This is the story of Breesan, whose mother died when she was a child and her father is MIA after being deployed in the military. She lives with her evil stepmother. She has no other family and her stepmother is emotionally abusive. Breesan has only two friends with whom she has grown up: Anna, her best friend, and Tristan, a childhood friend who is also Anna's boyfriend. Breesan is not interested in emotional en... moretanglements or dating of any kind, but has a hard time saying no to Anna.Breesan is set up on a party date with Morgan, Tristan's cousin, who has come back to town to work at the family business. Morgan's a playboy and attracted to Breesan but she's having none of it. At the party, she excuses herself to the ladies' room. And when she comes back she saunters up to Morgan and intensity ensues. They dance and then she finds out why things are so intense with Morgan... 'cause it's not Morgan, but his black-sheep twin, Marcus! She's embarrassed and feels foolish and yet confused because those feelings with Marcus were intense.Marcus has a secret and is keeping family secrets. Morgan is being forced to comply with family obligations even though he has other desires. So is Tristan (heck they're all related, so it's not a shock). Morgan wants a "friendship" with Breesan... and Marcus keeps popping up where she doesn't expect and their connection keeps getting stronger.As the story progresses we learn that Breesan is a target... she's been drugged, in a car accident (although supposedly this was explained by the tropical storm), and eventually shot at during Tristan's graduation/Breesan's birthday party. And that's not the half of it, because there's crap that the evil stepmother keeps pulling.It's fun to read, but there's so much jammed in here that it's a big exhausting.
review 2: I can’t honestly say I liked this book. I actually abandoned it twice to read other books but the story was compelling enough that I kept coming back to find out what happened. Unfortunately, by the end, it turns out very little happened.It was an Amazon freebie, and I’ve found that’s often the case with those. A new author comes up with a story line and throws the first piece out there free of charge to try to entice readers to put down the money to read the rest of the series. The only problem with that is that in order for it to work, you need to give your reader enough to entice them back. At least for me, Be All failed to do that.First, it was much too long for a teaser, nearly half again as long as the average Kindle book I read. If I’m going to dedicate that kind of time to a book, I expect some kind of satisfaction and resolution by the end. At the end of Be All nothing is resolved.The book also seems to struggle with finding an audience. Our heroine is a virginal, 19 year old high school graduate spending a summer at home on Willow, a rich folks playground island in the American deep south, before heading off to college. She and her friends are perfect fodder for a sweet, romantic and suspenseful YA novel. Missing father and evil step-mother Julia suggested we might be heading for some sort of fairy tale allegory and, by the end of the book, it appears that Breesan just might get the prince our fairy tale princess deserves, but she’s spent some much of the story dithering back and forth between the Walker twins and between wanting to be friends, more than friends and nothing to both boys that there is no sense of fairy tale happily ever after” in the declarations of love at the end of the novel.And then there are the Walker twins themselves. Rich, indulged, competitive, they are characters who would feel right at home in a hot, steamy Jackie Collins novel. They’re players, and why either of them, let alone both, would have any interest in inexperienced and virginal Breesan or satisfied with a stolen kiss here and there when they’re used to spending time with loose women like Waverly and Elise.In the end, Marie Wathen never seems to be able to figure out which audience she’s writing for, and thus she doesn’t really matter to write for any of them.The final failure of the book is the quality of its editing. A good editor with a pro-active blue pencil would probably have cut this book by at least half. There are countless characters and scenes that don’t seem to serve a useful purpose in developing either the plot or the characters. Perhaps some of them will play a role in a later book, but if that’s where they’ll come into their own, then why not save them until they’re needed? That same editor, would have caught the endless grammatical errors and mis-usage of words that often left me wondering what the heck the author was getting at. I sometimes had the sense that the writer was trying to adopt a sophisticated language that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with in order to give the book a certain feel. Instead, she left me wondering if she was writing in some odd, local dialect, or if she actually meant to use another, similar word that made a whole lot more sense. I am not a grammar Nazi , but persistent errors like missing words, switching tenses in the middle of a paragraph and using the wrong word always leave me with the impression that the author didn’t care enough to take pride in the craftsmanship of their work, and in this case, that’s too bad, because in spite of its faults, Be All had the potential to be a good book. It just didn’t deliver. less

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