*ARC courtesy of Netgalley and Random House Publishing*
Reading this till the end was really hard for me...I just couldn't connect with this story or its characters at all!
Julie/Ella is running from an abusive husband and the family that didn't believe her story of domestic abuse. She thinks of herself as 'dead inside-out' and she tries her hardest to mask her beauty since it could attract men like Blaine (the abusive asshole)...all very sad, pity though that straight after this explanation she went to a club with her friend Willow -let's not talk about her for the moment- and pretty much blew a guy met just an hour earlier. She didn't finish him 'cause she had a flashback and she run from the stranger but it didn't work. The same stranger, very understanding, tried to console her and offered to take her to his motel...that's the point where -I think- a frightened girl would have said no instead Julie accepted the offer! WHY??
What I liked the least about this character, even more so than her frequent tears and attempts to run away, it's exactly this inconsistency: she describe herself as fearful of men and insecure then she acts in a way that contradict pretty much everything. In the end she's not believable, neither as a victim, neither as a seductress.
Liam is also a contradiction and not in a good way: the Liam from the beginning and the one after the revelation of his status are two very different person.
His reasoning to offering the contract to Julie/Ella makes no sense and the way he talked about it made me want to slap him really hard. The lowest point he reached I think was when he tossed around his credit cards trying to impress Julie...I mean he literally threw them at her! Unfortunately his over the top cockiness makes an appearance (too) many times in the story.
He, like Julie/Ella, had a shitty past to overcome but the author doesn't elaborate about it until the very end and at that point I just couldn't sympathize with him and I also didn't think it justified his general behavior.
As for their relationship, it's a strange case of instant-love/lust/hate where none the above emotions are even a little believable.
Their story, after that first meeting and not quite blow-job, goes on pretty much like this: after the signing of the contract they spend together a day, then he leave for work for a week and doesn't call Julie at all. When he come back she has already run away. They spend apart some months and then they meet again when Willow -Julie's friend- is in the hospital. They finally have sex. Then they have a fight. They apologize to each other and then obviously he profess his love to her and ask her to marry him....ooooookay how could I not feel the love?!
Sorry, I really didn't get those two!
To be honest I couldn't connect even with the secondary characters; Willow in particular I really disliked!
Unfortunately I wasn't able to write anything somewhat positive about this book since it touched pretty much all my bad-buttons, still I'd like to thank again the staff of Random House Publishing Group - Loveswept from NetGalley for the chance to read&review an arc of Control and I hope they appreciate my honest (but not very positive) opinion about it.
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