But I did read He's Come Undone, a recent Daily Deal by one of the BIG TWO. Yay me! I believe it belongs in the NA category, which I'm not all that fond of. However, this story completely satisfied me, short as it was, 215 print pages according to the vendor.
Blurb:
Penniless and behind on rent, college student and once famous child actress Ellie Barlow takes on the role of a lifetime when she's hired by a group of young women to break the heart of the campus player who cruelly dumped them.
Transformed from slob slacker to jaw-dropping beauty, Ellie is dressed, styled, bleached and waxed, her chunky glasses exchanged for violet contacts. Along with physical prepping, she's coached on Julian's obsessions, which include long-distance running, Doctor Who, and J.D. Salinger.
In no time, Julian is in pursuit of his custom-made next victim, but when Ellie goes off script and begins to fall for her target, the newest broken heart in this risky game could be her own.
******
Julian is very damaged. He'd lost his parents in a traumatic way and has been trying to overcome PTSD and some other anagrams ever since. Running and sex both occupy his mind, overcoming his depression so that he doesn't think about his past. Despite the blurb, from Julian's inner thoughts we learn many of the girls come on to him and he rationalizes the one night stands by convincing himself that's all the girls want too. At the first of the book, he's is blaming all the sex on the girls; by the end he's realized he had acted like an asshole and the blame was on him. My feminist side was happy.
Ellie is damaged too (as everyone seems to be). She was a child star, her mother abused her money - as in spent it ALL - and then developed cancer and Ellie took care of her for two years until her death. Ellie doesn't talk of her past and tries to live under the radar.
So of course Ellie falls for Julian and regrets her contract with the girls. And of course Julian finds out before she can tell him. It's how it happened that kept me glued to the book. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
I like Weirs' writing style. We get some deep POV, but the story is never clunky. She doesn't go on and on and on to where the reader is silently (and sometimes not so silently) hollering "Enough already! Get on with some action!" The story flows. There may not be enough story detail for some folks, but I was definitely satisfied.
Valerie, Julian's sister, is an interesting, in that she considers herself a caregiver for Julian and worries over him constantly. She even has a chapter of her own. That's the only drawback to this book, if it can be considered a drawback. We get chapters from both Ellie and Julian's POV but they are not alternating and a couple of times I had to check back to see who I was reading.
Other than that I enjoyed this book immensely. On Lori's scale, I would rate it 8 inches, lol. I really must dip into my Weir TBR pile.
You can check out some reviews here.
Sounds intriguing. The plot sounds like the movie I saw the other day - John something must die. Obviously this is different but the premise is the same. The fact that it got an 8 inch tick of approval, I'll add it to the list to be checked out :)
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