Then and Always: Dani Atkins

Author: Dani Atkins
Book Name: Then and Always
Series: *
Order:*
Genre: Romance/Suspense
Rating:  Okay

Blurb:  Rachel Wiltshire has everything she’s ever wanted: a close group of friends, a handsome boyfriend, and acceptance to the journalism program at her top-choice college. But one fateful evening, tragedy tears her world apart.

Five years later, Rachel returns home for the first time to celebrate her best friend’s wedding. Still coping with her grief, she can’t stop thinking about the bright future she almost had, if only that one night had gone differently. But when a sudden fall lands her in the hospital, Rachel wakes to find that her life has completely changed. Now the people she loves most are not the way she remembers them. Unable to trust her own recollections, Rachel tries to piece together what really happened, and not even she can predict the astonishing truth.

Review:  This story is actually well written, but I just didn’t like it all that much because it isn’t the kind of book I like to read.  It doesn’t deserve a bad rating just because it isn’t my thing so it is incredibly hard to decide where it does deserve to fall.  This is the kind of book that you are either going to really like or you aren’t since it is so different.

You have the main story that is on the surface and you get that in the character scenes and events.  Then you have this hidden, underlying thread that hints at something more.  You know it is going somewhere because of the surface story, but you don’t really get many specific hints until late into the story.

For me, the main story was interesting, but a little lacking.  I kept waiting for something more exciting to happen, then a hint would be dropped as to that underlying story.  That made it more interesting.

My library had this tagged in both the romance and the suspense genres and is one of the reasons why I picked it up.  On the surface, it is a romance, but in my opinion the overall story really isn’t.  The suspense part, again on the surface, only has one real scene I’d classify as that, but the underlying thread is suspenseful as you are kind of on edge waiting for that to be revealed.  So in all it is a bit inaccurate in those genre classifications.

I didn’t like how it all played out in the end.  That is the part that just isn’t my thing.  I read for entertainment and I don’t find that kind of thing all that entertaining.  Sure there are lots of ways to look at it and interpret it, but I just don’t want to go there.  Because you can’t know the book goes there without either giving away the ending or reading the book there is no way to know that this wasn’t going to be my kind of book.  I hate that because if I’d known I never would have picked this book up.