Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Nicola Haken

Missing Pieces

Seventeen-year-old Maddie Davis has spent her whole life on the move. With an unstable mother who has a knack for making bad decisions, she’s never stayed in one place long enough to remember its postcode. But this time is different… This time, she has been dragged half way across the world. Arriving in California and being forced to go back to school feels like stepping back in time. She wants to go home…

Until she meets Blaine Elwood – the stepson of an old family friend.

Blaine appears to have it all. To the outside world, quarterback Blaine is rich, confident and has the ‘arrogant bad boy’ image down to a tee. But nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors. Nobody ever can. He has vowed never to let anyone get too close – let anyone discover how weak he is. So when new girl Maddie starts tugging at strings he didn’t know existed in his heart, his only option is to push her away…

Until he realizes how much he needs her.

Together, after being forced into adulthood from an early age, they begin to learn what it feels like to be young - to smile, to laugh... to love. So when shattered secrets and splintered lies start unraveling around them, will the trust they’ve worked so hard to build be irreparably destroyed? Or will they realize they are two pieces of the same broken puzzle?

Mag’s 3 Star Review:

Moving from city to city, not having much money, and having a unstable mom, has made for a hard upbringing for Maddie, but there was one thing she always had was the knowing love of her mother.  When Maddie’s mom packed up their stuff and moved from the UK to California, Maddie’s life was once again thrown into a whirlwind.  That is until Maddie crossed paths with Blaine Elwood.  

From the outside looking in, Blaine appears to have everything anyone would want, money, popularity, and power, but no one sees the darkness that creeps on the other side of his front door.  Blaine pushes everyone away to try and protect them from his damaged life, but once Maddie creeps inside his life she wont leave and he doesn’t want her to. 

This story is a beautiful one filled with heartache, passion, and love.  It’s about two individuals meeting and falling helplessly in love, but having to overcome so much heartache to come together.  One of the things I really liked about this story, was the fact that in most books the female character is the one I feel most connected to, but in this book I felt more for Blaine than I did for Maddie.  I felt as if he was, in essence, the “main” character, I connected to him more and felt more emotion towards him in the story.  There were a few things in this book that I didn’t really like.  Maddie came from the UK so she speaks in a different way that someone living in Cali would, but every once in a while Blaine would speak in the same UK way.  There were a few grammatical errors, and Blaine sometimes didn’t sound like a 17 year old guy but rather what the author thought a 17-year-old guy would sound like.  There were shocking moments that made me gasp and moments that made me awe.  Overall, this story was a beautiful story of two people falling in love and fighting each other’s demons.


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