TITLE: Devoured
SERIES: Devoured #1
AUTHOR: Emily Snow
PUBLICATION DATE: October 9, 2012
PUBLISHER: Touchstone, an imprint of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc
PAGES: 202 pages
FORMAT: Ebook
SOURCE: Borrowed
RATING: 4 stars
Sienna’s career is finally starting to pickup with a steady wardrobe job on a tv show, then she gets a call from telling her that her grandmother’s home is being foreclosed on. Taking time off work, she flies home to Nashville just in time to see Lucas Wolfe sitting across from her family in the courthouse. It’s been two years since her almost tryst with Lucas and she’s done everything she can to bury those memories. Now she’s faced with the ultimate decision. Allow Lucas to take her childhood home from her grandmother or work as his assistant for ten days to win back the deed. The right answer is obvious, but can she make it through the week without succumbing to Lucas’s…charm?
I’ll be honest here. The main reason this particular series caught my attention is because Dusan Novakovic is on the cover. The last novel I read with him on the cover was Easy, which blew me away. I realize that the cover model has no direct relationship with how good the story will be, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s the same way if I see Pepe Toth on the cover of something. I can’t promise I’ll read it immediately, but it does get added to my TBR pile. You can say that I had high expectations for this. It wasn’t perfect, or nearly as good as Easy, but it was worth a read.
Sienna is an interesting character, the opposite of what you’d expect from a red-headed woman. I think red, I think fiery and filled with attitude, but Sienna is rather submissive in the beginning. She allows everyone except Lucas to push her around and verbally abuse her. Watching Lucas push her to stand up for herself a bit more was interesting to see. As for Lucas, well, I don’t have much to say. Though we see a lot of them interacting, this is told entirely from Sienna’s perspective. This was shocking to me since All Over You was told in dual perspectives and I sorely missed getting Lucas’s side of things. Without his point of view, he seems a bit shallower than I expect him, much more focused on sex than anything else, including his music and that wasn’t exactly how he came off in AOY.
Really, this gets a 3.5 from me. It was good, but overall, it felt too short. It is a scant 200 hundred pages and while there are some writers that can get their point across well is that short space, this just wasn’t one where I felt like there wasn’t room for more. It felt a bit insta-love-y to me and everything felt a bit more forced than necessary. I realize that the concept is she has 10 days with him so everything must fall in that time frame, but, in my personal opinion, this book would have been much better if we got some of Lucas’s perspective as well. In fact, take this, combine it with the novella Snow is currently publishing chapter by chapter on her website, and combine them into one book instead of two. That would be the real winner.
Another issue that really isn’t entirely related to this book particularly but New Adult in general is the sex. I get that New Adult is for an older audience and much more explicit than YA, but I feel like too much of it reads like erotica, which isn’t what I’m looking for when I pickup one of these novels. Yes, I want more description than a YA would provide, but I’m not looking for a play by play of every single sexual activity the couple participate in. There are some points where less is more. Maybe it’s just me, but some of that seems overdone.
Either way, this is a pretty good read that really knows how to build the tension. It leaves off with a bit of a cliffhanger because we still don’t know what’s going on with Lucas’s ex or how they will resolve their issues, but one thing is certain and that is Sienna and Lucas will find a way to make it work.
Bows & Bullets Reviews 