Defensive Heart by Dorothy F. Shaw
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Copy received in exchange for an honest review
★Book Basics★
Genre: – Cont. Romance
Series: – 2nd in the series
Love triangle? – No
Cheating? – No but she does sleep with her ex, after she had met James and fooled around with him but before they start seeing each other
HEA? – Yes
Would I read more by this author/or in this series? – Yes
Rating – 2
★Review★
I did not enjoy this one as much as the first book.
Again, as with book one, a lot of back and forth, but here it felt like it was too too much. Given how cold the heroine could be, how much she argued and pushed the hero away, it just felt like he would have given up before getting to the point of being in love and not able to live without her.
The entire situation with her ex, allowing him to stay in her house when he visits, and sleep in her bed….even if they do not actually sleep together just made her seem weak. And we did not really get enough of her history, other than snippets to actually make her understandable. He ex was awful, truly horrible, yet given she spends the entire book pushing James away and arguing with him and telling him no, that she just meekly did as her ex wanted, did not fit with the character of her we had for the majority of the time in the book.
I did like the hero, he was great, but in all honestly, it felt like he was too good for the heroine, and she just hurt him again and again.
And she comes to the realisation, far too late in the book for me, that she has been wrong in pushing him away, so it felt like we got no reward as a reader, to see them happy, after all the angst and arguing and hurt to get to that point.
Also felt a bit cheated out of her actually finally telling her ex where to go.
However I do appreciate that the author can write such different characters and they are not just carbon copies of previous couples in the series. And I will be reading book 3.
Amazon UK Link – Defensive Heart (The Donnellys)
Amazon US Link – http://amzn.com/B0118ZFOG0
The Romance Reading Brit 
I TOTALLY agree with you on this one 🙂
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Am reading the third one and enjoying it so much more.
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Glad to hear it. I wanted to smack the heroine around so bad when it came to her ex.
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lol love the comments!
Contrary to some authors, I do appreciate the honest reviews. Especially the negative ones. I knew Sonja would not be liked. She’s definitely not the typical heroine in romance. Although I’ve had some readers really understand her madness. She’s closer to real life, and as I’m sure you know, in real life, some of us so screwed up things.
The good news? She’s got herself together now, (about time!) as you’ll see in book 3 and going forward.
Thank you! (Stacey, I’m including you. And I hope you’ll give books 1 and 3 a shot.)
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Yeah I will probably like her more going forward in future books, but she was a bit much for me in her own book. Also I loved Jimmy, and she was just mean to him!! 🙂
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She was. Gotta say, first draft of her, she was NOT redeemable. LOL It took a lot of work to soften her up. But the cool part is, people reacted to her just the way I knew they would. And that means, I did my job. =)
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Well, exactly I mean, I could see why she would be like she was, but she did make him work far too hard. They are sweet together in book 3 though.
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Excited you see it! I look forward to your review of Shattered Heart. ❤
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