Author: Jodi Perry
Genre/Age: Contemporary Romance/Adult
Series: None
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Format: ebook via Give Me Books
Rating: ✺✺✺✺
Links: Goodreads
Synopsis: Nineteen. There’s something about that number; it not only brought us together, bonding us forever, it also played a hand in tearing us apart.
The nineteenth of January 1996. I’ll never forget it. It was the day we met. I was seven and she was six. It was the day she moved in next door, and the day I developed my first crush on a girl.
Exactly nineteen years later, all my dreams came true when she became my wife. She was the love of my life. My soul mate. My everything. The reason I looked forward to waking up every morning.
Then tragedy struck. Nineteen days after we married, she was in an accident that would change our lives forever. When she woke from her coma, she had no memory of me, of us, of the love we shared.
I was crushed. She was my air, and without her I couldn’t breathe.
The sparkle that once glistened her eyes when she looked at me was gone. To her, now, I was a stranger. I had not only lost my wife, I had lost my best friend.
But I refused to let this tragedy be the end of us. That’s when I started to write her letters, stories of our life. Of when we met. About the happier times, and everything we had experienced together.
What we had was far too beautiful to be forgotten.
It’s a wet and dreary morning is the first thing I hear when the radio booms to life, alerting me to the fact it’s time to get up.
Dreary doesn’t even come close. The thought of no longer being able to spend every waking minute with my gorgeous husband has already put a dampener on my day. I can’t believe our time off together has come to an end. I hate that I have to go back to work this morning, and leave the little bubble Braxton and I have been living in for the past four weeks.
Right up until the wedding, things were so busy with our careers, building our dream house and organising our special day. Everything combined seemed to take away from us being together. This one-on-one time we’ve had since tying the knot was just what we both needed.
‘Morning, Mrs Spencer.’
He rolls onto his side, pulling me further into his warm, luscious body. It has been exactly nineteen days since we exchanged wedding vows, and I’m still floating.
‘Morning, Mr Spencer.’ I lean my forehead against his. ‘I’m not ready to go back to work. I can’t stand the thought of spending the entire day without you.’
He chuckles as his teeth nip at my pouting lip. ‘I feel exactly the same way, babe. Our time off has gone way too quick. We should have taken two months off, instead of one.’
Despite him being a constant figure in my daily life, for the past nineteen years, I still get a rush when I think about what our future together holds.
I met Braxton when my parents and I moved in next door. We were just kids, but we’ve been inseparable ever since. He’s my one and only. He always has been, and always will be. He’s not only the love of my life; he’s my best friend, my soul mate, my forever boy.
He’s incredibly dreamy, with his movie-star looks. I run my fingers through his sandy blond hair as my eyes roam over his perfectly sculpted face; his big blue eyes pop against his tanned skin. He has a smile that makes my knees weak. His front tooth turns in ever so slightly, but it takes nothing away from his Colgate-worthy smile.
When he realises I’m checking him out, the sexy grin that I adore appears on his face. It highlights the cute dimple in his left cheek. To this day, he still manages to turn my insides to mush, but it’s his inner beauty that affects me the most.
‘I could always call in sick,’ I say, perking up for a moment, but in reality I know it’s not possible. I have a big client coming in first thing Monday morning, and I need to prepare.
‘If I didn’t have this damn meeting later this morning, I’d say do it,’ he replies, smiling.
‘I’m going to miss you.’
‘I’m going to miss you too, Jem. The past four weeks have been my kind of heaven.’
I sigh. ‘I’d give anything to be back in Kauai right now.’
Jodi Perry was born in Sydney, Australia, and has lived there her whole life. Under the name J. L. Perry, her last four novels were all number-one bestsellers in eBook. Jodi travels annually to the UK and US to promote her books and to meet her many fans. Nineteen Letters is the first novel to be published under the name Jodi Perry.
AUTHOR LINKS
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JLPerryAuthor
Goodreads (Jodi Perry): https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6051057.Jodi_Perry
Goodreads (J.L. Perry): https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7825921.J_L_Perry
Instagram: http://bit.ly/1NtKXU5
PURCHASE LINKS
Hachette: http://bit.ly/2wQQvew
Kobo: http://bit.ly/2wHQ6vU
iBooks: http://apple.co/2w7Wlrj
Google Play: http://bit.ly/2q1q3YT
Audible: http://a.co/1dzbQpQ
**Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of this book.**
Best friends turn to lovers and then become strangers...
When Jemma leaves the comfort of her newly wedded bliss, she has no idea that she will wake up unable to remember her new husband or the life they've shared. But he isn't the only person she doesn't remember. Her family and friends have now become strangers and she doesn't even know herself anymore.
Braxton didn't just lose his loving wife in the accident, he also lost his best friend. The woman who gave his life purpose and has always been his shoulder to lean on. And when she now looks at him with vacancy in her eyes, his world is crushed. But giving up on Jem and their life together isn't a possibility. He needs to remind her of who she is and how much she means to him before it's too late.
I barely read the blurb for this book before I had decided to sign up to review it. While I don't usually seek out stories that appear to be tear-jerkers, I do love a good friends-to-lovers trope and the next door neighbor angle speaks to me on a personal level. After starting the story, I did love the way the letters were flashbacks to the couple's history. We got to see how they came together in the past and then watch them try to find their way back to each other in the present.
The book is a little on the wordy side but the pacing flowed fairly well. I only rarely found myself skimming, mostly over the more boring day-to-day aspects. But I did notice a small discrepancy or a "plot knot", so to speak. Braxton mentions he is 21 and drank a beer on their flight and then two years later he has his twenty-first birthday. A man can only turn 21 once. I'm not sure if my copy was an ARC that hadn't been through the final editing stages or if this plot hole just happen to fall through, but I did notice it.
I really enjoyed the story, but didn't love it. My main qualm with this book was probably of my own making. From the synopsis, I had assumed this would be a gut-wrenching story with a lot of conflict and painful attempts by our couple to reconnect. I expected to cry ugly tears and had prepared myself for it. But while I did get a little teary eyed once or twice, this wasn't necessarily the tension-filled story I thought it would be.
In fact, it became a tad bit too predictable. It was almost as if someone took all of the common love story elements and tossed them into one book. And then they drizzled it with love notes worded so eloquently I had trouble remembering they were supposed to have been written by a man. There were times when I thought it bordered on women's fiction because it was just as much about Jemma finding herself as it was Braxton finding his wife.
The couple's relationship during their childhood was so sweetly perfect that it started to become unrealistic. If there was strife between them, it was over in a flash with easy resolution. In both the past and the present, there weren't really any bursts of fiery passion between our couple, just a sweet simmer throughout the whole story. I guess I was expecting there to be more 'oomph' and less 'aww'. I would definitely classify this on the sweet side.
When Jemma leaves the comfort of her newly wedded bliss, she has no idea that she will wake up unable to remember her new husband or the life they've shared. But he isn't the only person she doesn't remember. Her family and friends have now become strangers and she doesn't even know herself anymore.
Braxton didn't just lose his loving wife in the accident, he also lost his best friend. The woman who gave his life purpose and has always been his shoulder to lean on. And when she now looks at him with vacancy in her eyes, his world is crushed. But giving up on Jem and their life together isn't a possibility. He needs to remind her of who she is and how much she means to him before it's too late.
I barely read the blurb for this book before I had decided to sign up to review it. While I don't usually seek out stories that appear to be tear-jerkers, I do love a good friends-to-lovers trope and the next door neighbor angle speaks to me on a personal level. After starting the story, I did love the way the letters were flashbacks to the couple's history. We got to see how they came together in the past and then watch them try to find their way back to each other in the present.
The book is a little on the wordy side but the pacing flowed fairly well. I only rarely found myself skimming, mostly over the more boring day-to-day aspects. But I did notice a small discrepancy or a "plot knot", so to speak. Braxton mentions he is 21 and drank a beer on their flight and then two years later he has his twenty-first birthday. A man can only turn 21 once. I'm not sure if my copy was an ARC that hadn't been through the final editing stages or if this plot hole just happen to fall through, but I did notice it.
I really enjoyed the story, but didn't love it. My main qualm with this book was probably of my own making. From the synopsis, I had assumed this would be a gut-wrenching story with a lot of conflict and painful attempts by our couple to reconnect. I expected to cry ugly tears and had prepared myself for it. But while I did get a little teary eyed once or twice, this wasn't necessarily the tension-filled story I thought it would be.
In fact, it became a tad bit too predictable. It was almost as if someone took all of the common love story elements and tossed them into one book. And then they drizzled it with love notes worded so eloquently I had trouble remembering they were supposed to have been written by a man. There were times when I thought it bordered on women's fiction because it was just as much about Jemma finding herself as it was Braxton finding his wife.
The couple's relationship during their childhood was so sweetly perfect that it started to become unrealistic. If there was strife between them, it was over in a flash with easy resolution. In both the past and the present, there weren't really any bursts of fiery passion between our couple, just a sweet simmer throughout the whole story. I guess I was expecting there to be more 'oomph' and less 'aww'. I would definitely classify this on the sweet side.
In closing...
A sweet romance and story of second chances. Four suns!
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