READ: REVIEW – Captivated by You by Sylvia Day. PDF, EPUB online free reviews.

Title – Captivated by You
Author – Sylvia Day
Publication Date – November 18, 2014
Series – Crossfire, #4

Gideon calls me his angel, but he’s the miracle in my life. My gorgeous, wounded warrior, so determined to slay my demons while refusing to face his own.

The vows we’d exchanged should have bound us tighter than blood and flesh. Instead they opened old wounds, exposed pain and insecurities, and lured bitter enemies out of the shadows. I felt him slipping from my grasp, my greatest fears becoming my reality, my love tested in ways I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to bear.

At the brightest time in our lives, the darkness of his past encroached and threatened everything we’d worked so hard for. We faced a terrible choice: the familiar safety of the lives we’d had before each other or the fight for a future that suddenly seemed an impossible and hopeless dream…

I feel like I had to wait forever to get the next installment of Gideon and Eva’s story, and then when it was released, life was crazy and I had to wait all this time to be able to dive in. Captivated by You is the fourth installment of the Crossfire novels, and with that comes the incredibly mixed reviews from readers. Sylvia Day has clearly built up a fan base when it comes to her writing, but especially with this couple. She knows how to bring the heat and steam without taking away from the quality of her writing, and that’s what will continue to bring readers back for more.

“The hunger between us was a living thing in the room, sliding sinuously around us, narrowing the world to just the two of us.”

Throughout this novel, I was really waiting for something to happen, craving more of the action that Sylvia Day had shown in the first three books of the series. I had gotten so used to the craziness of Gideon and Eva’s relationship, that I almost forgot about all the backstory and history that each individual was facing. Captivated by You felt like it was less about the heat, and more about the characters discovering what they failed to acknowledge previously. They both had to come to grips with their past in order to ever have a future, and the fourth book was really about doing just that. It was a very stripped down look into battling our own demons, as opposed to the way the characters chose to ignore it before.

“He’d saved me, in so many ways. I was going to do whatever needed to be done to save him, too.”

My favorite thing about Captivated by You was the tremendous growth you were able to see in both the characters by the end of the novel. Gideon has a slew of problems that has scarred him. However, it wasn’t really until the end of this book that he started to actually deal with them. Even though a major part of that is due to Eva’s actions, I still admired that he wanted to begin to better himself. I was so proud and happy to see Eva developing a little bit more of a backbone. She stood her ground, no matter how hard it was at times, which resulted in an admiration for her character that I didn’t previously have. The way that she was able to remove herself from certain situations and identify the bad behaviors so that she could correct them and become better certainly made me like her even more.

“She was every promise, every hope, every fantasy a man could have. And she was mine.”

I had a really hard time reviewing and rating this book. It’s not that I didn’t like it, but it just wasn’t on the same field as the previous three novels. Maybe it was the built up hype in my head or just the timing of when I read it, but I expected more out of Sylvia Day. I’ll still be going on to read the fifth, and final, book in the series and hope that some of the pacing issues are worked out. I’m anxious to see how Sylvia Day chooses to close the chapter on these two unforgettable characters.