[REPOST!]

Grade: B+

Sharon Cullars is awesome. Her first book Again was both scary and sexy and after reading it, I found myself looking for more to read by this lady. I was psyched beyond belief when I checked out Amazon and found this book available for pre-order. It releases on April 24, but I couldn’t possibly wait that long, so I emailed the lady and begged her for an ARC. She was kind enough to send me this copy and kids, let me tell you, the very moment I had this book in my hand, I shoved everything aside and read it from cover to cover in one sitting. You can’t tell from the man-titty on the cover, but what’s inside is actually plenty creepy, yet sexy at the same time. There’s really two stories in this book: one is about a grieving woman who had just lost her twenty-one year old son in a senseless accident and takes solace in the arms of her son’s twenty-one year old best friend. The other is about an angry, angry ghost who can’t seem to let go because he sees his mother being seduced by his former best friend and wants to make sure that the two of them never ever end up together even if he has to resort to murder. Individually, the stories work quite well without the other, but don’t blend as well together. It is not seamless. They don’t flow together, which is why in some places, the supernatural aspect feels slapped on. But more on that later. The romantic aspect of the story doesn’t quite work for me, either, but the two leads do have some sizzling sexual tension between them and the fact that they’re such flawed, damaged characters trying to reach out to each other made for a compelling read.

Lacey Burnham is a forty-something marketing exec who has worked very, very hard over the years to provide everything for her only son, Calvin, that she never received as a child. Calvin’s father, Lacey’s husband, died when Calvin was very young, so Lacey had to raise Calvin on her own and because of the very demanding aspects of her job, is grieved to admit that she wasn’t as present in Calvin’s life as much as she should have been. When Calvin dies in a car accident, the grief almost crushes Lacey and she blames herself because she never felt she was truly there for Calvin. She had provided him all the luxuries in the life, but couldn’t really guide him on how to become a good man. Now that Calvin is dead, all Lacey wants to do is curl into a dark corner, crawl inside herself, and grieve for the loss of her only son… that is, until Sean Logan, Calvin’s childhood friend, shows up at her doorstep. Once a sullen, angry young boy, Sean has grown up to be a confident, charming and super-sexy man. Lacey finds herself immediately drawn to him, but refuses to acknowledge that she could be attracted to him. One, she is twice his age; two, he and Calvin had a falling out five years before and Lacey never found out why; and three, he is a white boy. Sean is just in town for the funeral, but when he reveals he is staying at some cheap-o motel, Lacey feels compelled to offer him a place to stay. It isn’t the first time she has offered solace to the troubled youth he used to be, but he’s a man now… a hot, hot, young man and Lacey can’t seem to take her hands eyes off of him.

Calvin Burnham was Sean Logan’s best friend. When Sean and Calvin were kids, the two of them were inseparable and Sean was a mainstay at Calvin’s house. Sean grew up in a household with a drunken, abusive father and a mother who never defended him, which is why he liked spending time at Calvin’s house. But the reason Sean kept going back to Calvin’s house is Lacey, Calvin’s mother. Even as a ten-year old boy, Sean saw Lacey not as a mother, but as a beautiful woman who could use a man to take care of her and cherish her. To him, she is the most graceful, exquisite woman he had ever seen, and becomes his measuring stick when it comes to every woman he meets. He would have been content to nurse a crush on her for the rest of his life… until tragedy tears apart Sean and Calvin’s friendship and Sean has to leave town immediately with his mother. Five years later, Sean is back in town for Calvin’s funeral and plans to leave as soon as it’s over. Until he sees Lacey and decides at that moment to stay just a little bit longer. As he and Lacey slowly grow closer together, he realizes he will do anything to keep her with him and make her admit her feelings for him. But the deep, dark secrets that almost destroyed him five years ago come bubbling to the surface and threaten to tear him and Lacey apart. Oh, and Calvin, as non-corporeal as he is, is still hanging around and will do anything to keep him away from Lacey.

Lacey is a strong, intelligent woman. She’s got a good head on her shoulders, but her son Calvin has always been her weakness. She’s blind to all of Calvin’s faults and refuses to believe he was anything but a good boy even though the evidence to the contrary begin to pile up and she realizes she never really knew him. Her grief for Calvin is palpable and true, which is why it was so interesting to see her struggling to suppress her feelings for Sean because she knows that nothing good could come out of it and whatever she may be feeling for Sean could only be a side-effect of her grief. For years, she has spent her life trying to be the perfect mother to Calvin and working to get her career off the ground, neglecting her needs as a woman, which is why she would be susceptible to falling in love with Sean, her son’s childhood friend and a young man half her age. Honestly, I wasn’t convinced she and Sean would have gotten together if Calvin hadn’t died, but I guess that is the point. Their mutual grieving for Calvin bring the two of them together… oh, and hot-hot-monkey sex, I suppose. In the end, I had a hard time believing she could really be in love with Sean or if the two of them even have a future together. People do a lot of crazy shit when they’re grieving and I wasn’t convinced it wasn’t more than that on Lacey’s part.

Sean, on the other hand, is the hotness. He broods, he’s got issues, and the relentless way he pursues Lacey is kind of scary, but in a sexy way. This guy is willing to do anything for this woman; she is his every waking thought, his obsession, his raison d’etre… and he has felt that way ever since he was a little boy. He has loved her for so long that I wasn’t convinced if he loved the woman or the idea of the woman he had admired from childhood. What’s to stop him from dumping her for a younger chick once she starts looking old and skanky? But I guess the point of this story is… the leap of faith that a person takes when he falls in love and decides to risk it all for that one person. I don’t know if I could buy that Sean felt anything for Lacey besides infatuation and obsession… I mean, what does he know about her as a woman? While there is something hot about an older woman taking a man half her age as a lover, it’s never really worked for me as a romantic plot. Sean has always been infatuated with Lacey, but Lacey is feeling vulnerable because she just lost her son, which is why she gives in to Sean. What else is there between them? But that doesn’t mean there isn’t sizzling chemistry between these two. Cullar is a whiz at conveying sexual tension between her romantic leads, so while I wasn’t convinced that the hero and the heroine will have an HEA where they will run away together and open up a waffle house somewhere, I could at least see why they are so drawn to each other.

And then there’s the supernatural aspect of the story. It’s all very Lovely Bones crossed with a generous helping of Poltergheist and was quite riveting on its own. It is written in a different tone from the rest of the story and narrated from Calvin’s point of view, which means we get heaps and heaps of flashbacks that tell us why he and Sean couldn’t be friends anymore and why he is so very angry. And he is angry. I thought it was kind of creepy how he watches his mother getting dressed or doing it with Sean… gross. Calvin is interesting because he is unable to see past his own anger and can’t admit that what happened to him and Sean could be his fault. It’s a cool ghost story told from the point of view of the ghost, but it’s so isolated from the rest of the story—-which is quite effective in a way because it conveys Calvin’s frustration about being unable to communicate with the world of the living—-and seems… intrusive. It doesn’t weave in well with the rest of the story and seems slapped on. I thought one story would have done just fine without the other. If we never got Calvin’s point of view and Lacey had to figure out on her own why Calvin and Sean had a falling out, it would have lent some mystery to the piece. If the story itself had been about Calvin trying to get over his anger about his former best friend falling in love with his mother and working to redeem himself, it would have made a riveting horror piece. But as it is, the two stories just don’t flow together. In the end, Cullars provides too much information to the reader and it’s just… a tad overwhelming, I guess. It makes the narrative seem… cluttered and makes the story sag a little bit in the middle.

This book isn’t as tightly plotted as Cullars’ debut book Again, but the author’s strong narrative voice and compelling prose are quite present here. Lacey’s sexual revolution, Sean finding his own purpose in life, and Calvin finally recognizing his own faults… they are all very engrossing stories, but I just wish they had all been woven more tightly together. Cullars is a wonderful writer and it is a testament to her talent that I was able to keep turning the pages even though I was frustrated with the narrative. The lady can write horror, mystery, and romance… it’d be even better if she can pull them all together. Nevertheless, it’s a compelling read and I highly recommend it. I can’t wait to read more from this lady.

Kids, you can pre-order this book here. It comes out on April 24, 2007. Mark your calendars!

Technorati Tag: The Object of Love

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Books, Grade: B, Romance: Paranormal, Romance: Contempo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.