After Anyone But Her,
Erica Lee seems to have developed a special liking for a setting where the
leads are forced to spend time together with one of their families. The forced
time together plus the family dynamics then becomes integral to the way their
relationship develops. So here she takes us back into a
forced-holiday-with-family setting once again.
Madly in love Skylar Davis and Kennedy Moore were married
for five years. Life interfered with their relationship and the relationship
suffered as a consequence which ended in their separation. Six months after
separating, Kennedy sent divorce papers to Skylar which the latter refuses to
sign. Plus Skylar hasn’t spoken about their impending divorce to her family
which totally love Kennedy. Skylar has always felt that she’s disappointed her
family and is just not good enough – Kennedy is the only thing that Skylar’s
family approves about her. So when the Davis’ annual two-week-long beach
vacation comes around Kennedy receives an excited call from her mother-in-law
and subsequently Skylar kind of manipulates Kennedy into going for the vacation
together making it a trade-off for signing the divorce papers.
With her mother as the spearhead and her father and three
siblings choosing to keep quiet, Skylar has always sought approval which she’s
never received. All Davises are doctors, but Skylar is a photographer which is
one more mark against her. The lifelong disapproval and dismissal has marked
Skylar is terrible ways making her always feel not good enough and forever
waiting for the other shoe to fall. Clearly she is damaged and understandably
such a person would have a difficult time building a healthy relationship.
Skylar is someone we can understand and even empathise with.
But that doesn’t mean we can like her. No. In fact, we don’t like her in the least bit. We don’t like her because she never grows up from the past despite having
the person she loves love her back with passion. And she leaves Kennedy
without a word. Without fighting for Kennedy. Without fighting for them. She is all woe-is-me and building
self-protective walls despite how much and how many times Kennedy reaches out
to her. Kennedy truly got a raw deal in life when she fell in love with Skylar,
a person who is unwilling to embrace love with all she is.
Finding love is difficult enough and when you find someone
like Kennedy, who loves you so much, you do
not let that go. Worse is pushing
Kennedy away even when Kennedy explicitly talks about getting back together
with an excuse that is flimsy at best.
Seeing how many issues we had with Skylar, clearly we didn’t
enjoy reading this book much. We almost DNF-d it. (Come to think of it – in all
of Erica Lee’s book one of the MCs always gets our goat and we feel super angry
at their behaviour with the other MC who is someone very, very nice).
However, Skylar majorly ticked our pet peeve box. That doesn’t
mean this is a bad book. In fact, we see a lot of people enjoying it. You can
expect a certain level of entertainment from Erica Lee’s book and this falls in
that space.
We wish we hadn’t spent time reading this one, but would
recommend it nevertheless because we recognise that it would be quite
appreciated by a lot of romance readers.
⭐⭐★
