Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Good For You (Between the Lines #3) by Tammara Webber


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SPOILER ALERT!!!  Due to the nature of this trilogy, it is impossible to review this book (or even read the synopsis) without giving away the ending to the previous book.  So stop now if you haven’t read Between the Lines and/or Where You Are and don’t want to know how it ends.

Reid Alexander's life is an open book. His Hollywood celebrity means that everything he does plays out in the public eye. Every relationship, every error in judgment is analyzed by strangers. His latest mistake totaled his car, destroyed a house and landed him in the hospital. Now his PR team is working overtime to salvage his image. One thing is clear—this is one predicament he won’t escape without paying for it.

Dori Cantrell is a genuine humanitarian—the outward opposite of everything Reid is about. When his DUI plea bargain lands him under her community service supervision, she proves unimpressed with his status and indifferent to his proximity, and he soon wants nothing more than to knock her off of her pedestal and prove she's human.

Counting the days until his month of service is over, Dori struggles to ignore his wicked magnetic pull while shocking him with her ability to see past his celebrity and challenging him to see his own wasted potential. But Dori has secrets of her own, safely locked away until one night turns her entire world upside down. Suddenly their only hope for connection and redemption hinges on one choice: whether or not to have faith in each other. (GoodReads)


Review:

Remember how I wanted Reid to take a long walk off a short pier?  And then at the end of Where You Are I thought there might be a slight bit of hope for him after all?  Well, Good For You (Between the Lines #3), was Tammara Webber’s chance to make me like Reid Alexander.  Maybe even love him.

Reid is quickly falling into a life of regular binge drinking and blackouts.  When one of those blackouts results in him driving his car into a house, his life can’t possibly get any lower.  One of the terms of his plea bargain is that he must help rebuild the home that he destroyed.

Dori is unimpressed with his forced community service and expects the minimum from him.  What she learns is that for all his publicized carelessness, Reid is a hard worker and isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.  A friendship slowly develops between these two but quickly ends once Dori shows no interest in continuing their friendship after Reid’s community service is done.  Then something terrible happens in Dori’s life and somehow Reid Alexander is the one person she can turn to with all her doubts and fears.  Their friendship starts off where it left off and slowly develops into more.

All I have to say is this.  Congratulations Tammara Webber.  You managed to make me accept and love a character that I have up until now despised.  I mean, I can’t tell you how much I disliked Reid Alexander in the last two books.  And even though he showed some hope at the end of the last book, it wasn’t enough to make me like him.  But in the end?  Well, I almost loved him.

Ms. Webber managed to set a perfect pace for this story.  Nothing happens quickly but at the same time I couldn’t stop turning the pages.  Dori’s character is rather uptight and pretentious but I couldn’t help liking her anyway.  Part of that might be because of how quickly she deduced Reid’s jerk-like qualities.  And then there was Reid.  He was every bit the ass that he was in the previous two books.  But the author took that fragility that only the reader caught glimpses of and made it slowly blossom through out the book so that, by the end, we had a hero that had believably redeemed himself.

This was indeed my favorite book in the series.  I would recommend the whole series for this story alone. If you like a page turning teen romance, I can’t recommend this one enough.

Nat

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