A Relentless #REVIEW

Relentless (Shattered Hearts #1) by Cassia Leo is a powerful story of a girl just trying to survive.

BLURB
Claire Nixon is a twenty-year-old college dropout with a secret.

To Claire, Adam Parker is just another flirty customer at the cafe, until a chance encounter and seemingly innocent comment spurs a bet between them. The bet is simple: If Adam can get Claire to reveal the secret that made her drop out of college, she has to re-enroll. If he doesn’t succeed, she gets to keep her secret and he has to stop stalking her at the cafe.

Claire thinks she has this one in the bag. She’s perfected the art of forgetting her past. But she isn’t prepared for Adam’s relentless pursuit or for him to share his own secrets. And she’s definitely not prepared for her rock star ex, and her secret, to come banging down her door one year later.

New Adult Contemporary Romance: Due to strong language, drug use, and sexual content, this book is not intended for readers under the age of 18.

REVIEW
Relentless is a star in the New Adult subgenre. The author nails the young-adults-finding-themselves component so well that I cannot stop thinking about these characters. Theirs is a story about learning to live with yourself after making difficult decisions, dealing with pain and being strong enough to move on.

Claire is an incredibly complicated character. She’s tormented by guilt. She’s had one heck of a difficult childhood, carries a secret that’s incapacitating her and is just focused on surviving when she meets Adam. Adam is her future. Chris is her past. For a while, it seems as if Adam is going to be the force that propels her to move forward. Then life throws a wrench in the plans and nothing is as it might seem.
The emotions are palpable and I was transported back to a time when everything in life hinged on who you were with, those life decisions that were so huge and working my way through mistakes that I couldn’t let define me. I completely got Claire.

Her story is powerful, the book so well written, that I’ve been recommending it to everyone. This is a “must read” for anyone who wants to try this subgenre of romance.

RATING
5 Chocolate-Dipped Strawberries

TOP QUOTE

"The relentless pull of love is a thousand times harder to fight than the tides. If you're lucky, you'll make it out before you drown. If you're even luckier, you're pulled under just long enough to wash away the sorrow. If you're really lucky, like me, you resurface just in time to find the one you love floating right beside you." -Claire