When Life Happened by Jewel E. Ann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am a writer. I am a daydreamer. I spend a lot of time doing both, and soon I will have a published book to show for all of those tireless hours I’ve spent putting my daydreams down onto paper.
Because I am a writer and a dreamer, I am also in turn a reader. I read a lot. Perhaps not as much as I’d like, but I do what I can. I call it “research.” I call it a “learning experience.” I call it a lot of things but when it comes down to it, I just love the beauty of falling into another world and falling in love with the pictures and people in my head.
Because I read a lot, and because I am a writer, I occasionally come across a book that makes me wish that I was the one to write it. That I was the one to have the honor of plastering my name behind the book title, to call it my own. This doesn’t happen all that often, to be totally honest, but when it does, it is a magical fucking thing that leaves me with that ever-delicious “book hangover.”
I think about that book for hours on end, wishing I could suck that author’s talent into my own soul like a goddamn Dementor. These books, and the authors that write them, are my teachers, and the ones I’m most grateful for having found them.
This book is one of those.
To say that I am floored by this novel would be an understatement. To say that I am enthralled with this novel would also be an understatement. But I’m going to have to settle on that, because this book has left me grasping for words to describe just how much I am absolutely head over heels in love with it.
I mean, I am not an outwardly emotional person, okay? I am not a person who typically sheds tears over a book, or a person who gasps because a part in a book legitimately shocked the breath out of me. I am not the type of person who laughs out loud when reading a book. The most you’ll get out of me is a little chuckle, a little smile, but a double-over belly laugh? One that leaves me clutching my gut and gasping for air? No, my friends. Shit like that doesn’t happen to me, because I have control over myself. Too much control, even. But this book…
This book made me lose that control. I laughed – hard. I cried actual tears. I gasped. I clutched at my chest and verbally scolded the characters, and cheered them on. I fell in love with them the way I fall in love with my own, and I was unabashedly saddened to my core when it was over.
I cannot praise the writing ability of Jewel E. Ann enough. The pacing was absolute perfection. A longer book, yes, but I cannot recall a single moment that left me wishing it would speed up. Her talent of bringing these quirky characters to life was amazing. The sexual tension she was able to put down on the proverbial page was, in a word, startling. And…
Well, Christ, I really don’t know what else to say, other than…
In my psuedo-career as an author, if I can write one story that comes at all close to the emotional perfection that is this book, I will consider myself blessed. But until then, I urge anybody reading this review to READ. THIS. BOOK.
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