Review: Left Drowning by Jessica Park

Left Drowning
By: Jessica Park
Publisher: Skyscape
Published: July 16, 2013
Genre: New Adult Romance
Rating:

Weighted down by the loss of her parents, Blythe McGuire struggles to keep her head above water as she trudges through her last year at Matthews College. Then a chance meeting sends Blythe crashing into something she doesn’t expect—an undeniable attraction to a dark-haired senior named Chris Shepherd, whose past may be even more complicated than her own. As their relationship deepens, Chris pulls Blythe out of the stupor she’s been in since the night a fire took half her family. She begins to heal, and even, haltingly, to love this guy who helps her find new paths to pleasure and self-discovery. But as Blythe moves into calmer waters, she realizes Chris is the one still strangled by his family’s traumatic history. As dark currents threaten to pull him under, Blythe may be the only person who can keep him from drowning.

Blythe’s parents have been dead for four years but she still blames herself for her parents deaths. She’s been in a drunken stupor since then and finds that the alcohol makes the pain go away. However, that all changes when she meets a strange guy in a coffee shop. He drinks her coffee, talks circles around her until she’s confused and then invites her to his play. Then right after that she goes to the beach and bumps into a hot guy skipping stones on the water. After hours hanging out on the beach she blurts out how her parents are dead and he responds with the fact that his mother is dead as well. This is where the beautiful romance begins.

I liked the idea of the story but unfortunately, some parts were way to fast paced while others were drawn out. For instance, I feel like Blythe’s darkness wasn’t portrayed enough. The story starts with her stumbling up to her dorm room plastered out of her mind. She calls her brother who is clearly not surprised by his sisters behavior and even seems to dislike her to a degree. So you get the sense that she is a train wreck and has some deep issues. However, the next morning she wakes up, meets these two guys, goes to a play and totally does a 180. She went from having no friends except for a bottle of vodka to a group of friends within a day. It’s as if the beginning never happened. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of the dark Blythe with a slower transition into the happy Blythe.

The Shepherd characters were engaging if not a little bizarre… okay a lot bizarre. Their mannerisms, the way they interact with each other and pretty much everything about them was not normal. However, when you get towards the end of the book and you are caught up with their full background, and then you start to understand their personalities a bit better.

There weren’t a lot of surprises in this one for me. I pretty much knew what was going on towards the beginning. The only thing that was different from normal new adult (broken h/H, H who isn’t “boyfriend material”, lots of sex) is that the secondary characters were a crazy (in a coo-coo way) bunch. Other then that, this book follows what now seems to be the new adult pattern. I wish there was more to it than that, but after Blythe masturbates to the memory of Chris a couple of times and they lock themselves in a hotel room for 5 straight days to boink, the only thing I could think of was “she must have a vagina of steel”. There is no way I could do the horizontal tango multiple times in a day on the day I toss my “V card” out the window. It makes my hoo-ha hurt just thinking about it.

Aside from the predictability, the new adult “color in the lines” plot and all the sex that a prostitute can handle, the story was good. I would have liked more depth to the story but in the end it was still an enjoyable read.

“Rum. I hate rum. Nobody should like rum. The only time rum should be consumed is at a tropical resort. And then you have to have those asshole little umbrellas and mini plastic swords that hold fucking fruit chunks.”