Reviewer: Tracy Fighting Fate by Linda Kage
Series: Granton University #1
Publisher: Omnific Publishing
Publication Date: July 16, 2013
Format: eARC
Genres: New Adult
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Series Rating:
Forgiving your brother’s murderer may be noble, but falling in love with him borders on betrayal.
When Paige Zukowski enrolls at Granton University in honor of her dead brother, she has no idea fate will land her on the same campus with the very guy who killed him. But Logan Xander isn’t quite the murderer she’s always believed him to be.
A day hasn’t passed since the tragedy that Logan doesn’t wish he could go back and undo everything. It doesn’t take Paige long to realize he’s suffered as much as she has. Forgiving him for ruining her life might not be so impossible after all. But when she actually starts to like him and realizes he likes her in return, their true anguish begins.
The last thing that Paige expects on her first day of college is to see the guy that killed her brother. She’s freaks out more than a bit but tries to deal with it the best she can. She tries to stay away from him as much as possible but the more she sees him around campus the more she sees that he’s not the person she thought he was at all. That doesn’t mean that she can give into these feelings about him that she has as she knows it’s just wrong. Paige joins a grief group and the group helps her get through all the pain she hasn’t let go over the past 3 years. She ends up forgiving Logan but she’s still leery of starting anything with him.
Logan freaks out when he realizes who Paige is as well and just knows that she’s going to tell everyone on campus what he did and he’ll have to leave or something. But surprisingly she doesn’t. They end up at the same grief group and while he takes a break from it for a while he too knows that the group has helped him immensely. He has so much guilt over the death of Paige’s brother – especially when it really was something that could have happened to anyone. He knows he doesn’t deserve someone as wonderful as Paige but that doesn’t stop him from longing for her.
“This could ever happen in a million years!” was the thought that was going through my head when I read the blurb to this one – but I was definitely intrigued enough to want to read it and I’m glad I did.
This is definitely not what I’d call your typical New Adult books (at least not the ones I’ve read). Logan isn’t a “bad boy” that’s forbidden. Ok, he’s forbidden but for a completely different reason. I can’t imagine how Paige felt while she was starting to have feelings for Logan and knowing what that would do to her father and her best friend. She thought she was whack because she should never feel this way. Fate had a different idea and put them together.
The best part of this story – besides the characters which were really very good – was the journey that Paige and Logan took. The romance certainly didn’t happen overnight and they had some serious shit to work through. I was really happy that the author didn’t rush through it. She had the h/h work through their issues as they came. Now a few more popped up during the story that they had to work on together and I wondered when their bad luck would end but in the end I liked how it all turned out.
I see on the author’s website that there will be more books having to do with Paige’s friend in the dorm and I’m definitely looking forward to reading those as well.
Rating: 4 out of 5