After reading the book and the blurb about the author and her accolades I feel bad about my rating. In truth, at the beginning of the book I was only going to give it one star because the writing was that of a preteen with shocking bouts of erotica. I say erotica because it was certainly more than your traditional "Harlequin" style. I don't believe any story needs that kind of writing and only serves to add word count when the author could be taking that time to add depth to her individual characters. I dragged through to find something in the book that would raise it's worth and finally we found more of a story and its characters once I was almost three quarters of the way into the book. If I were a teacher I would hand this back and tell the student to ditch the first half and expand on the story that seems to almost start at the end. ( )