Rowena’s review of Breaking Nova (Nova #1) by Jessica Sorensen.
Nova Reed used to have dreams-of becoming a famous drummer, of marrying her true love. But all of that was taken away in an instant. Now she’s getting by as best she can, though sometimes that means doing things the old Nova would never do. Things that are slowly eating away at her spirit. Every day blends into the next . . . until she meets Quinton Carter. His intense, honey brown eyes instantly draw her in, and he looks just about as broken as she feels inside.
Quinton once got a second chance at life-but he doesn’t want it. The tattoos on his chest are a constant reminder of what he’s done, what he’s lost. He’s sworn to never allow happiness into his life . . . but then beautiful, sweet Nova makes him smile. He knows he’s too damaged to get close to her, yet she’s the only one who can make him feel alive again. Quinton will have to decide: does he deserve to start over? Or should he pay for his past forever?
I guess it had to happen sooner or later. Jessica Sorensen was going to write a book that just wasn’t for me. Try as I might, I could not get into this book but that didn’t stop me from reading it and hoping that things would turn around and that I’ll finally start liking it but when the book ended, I was more than a little frustrated and a whole lot of disappointed that I never got around to liking this one.
Nova and Quinton are broken characters, suffering from things that happened to their exes. Both have dead exes and both are struggling with understanding where to go from here. Nova tries to move on but can’t get past all of the questions that run through her head each and every single day. Why did he do it? Why didn’t he love me enough to stay? Where do I got from here? Nova’s got all these questions and the one person who could give her answers, is dead.
Quinton was driving the car that killed his cousin and his girlfriend. He’s carrying a shit load of guilt everywhere he goes and that guilt is making him fall into a world that will one day claim his life and the thing about all of it is, he doesn’t care. He wants to die. He wants to forget but every day, the sun rises and Quinton opens his eyes and deals with the guilt all over again.
When Quinton moves in with his cousin, he meets Nova. There’s an attraction there that Quinton isn’t prepared for and isn’t going to touch because 1) he’s so fucked up and 2) his cousin has already called dibs on her. But the attraction isn’t going away and it’s just his luck that Nova is attracted to him, right back.
The whole book is one depressing thought after another depressing scene. It took me so long to read this because I had to keep putting the book down or it would pull me into a deep depression and when I got to about the halfway point of the book (maybe a little before), I started getting frustrated. All of the drug use and all of the drinking, the dick moves made from the people that were supposed to be their friends made my enjoyment of this book fall further and further away. Nova came across as weak and the longer she just kept drifting, the more frustrated I got with her. Quinton was worse because every time he got high, I wanted to smack him upside his head. I didn’t understand the whole guilt thing he put himself through. He wasn’t drinking the night that accident so he was stone cold sober. Should he have pulled over when his girlfriend started acting crazy and throwing herself out the window? Of course but everything happened so fast and he was trying to save everyone that everything caught up with him and things ended badly.
The longer this book went on and the longer Nova and Quinton continued to fuck up made me almost put the book down for good more than once. It was a hard book to get through and in the end, the cliff hanger made me want to punch a wall because sometimes, a story just needs to end instead of dragging itself out until I no longer cared what happened. Toward the end of this book, I found myself feeling that way and when I finished, I was glad that I read this book. I wasn’t happy for the characters even though Nova got her act together, I was more mad at Quinton and his refusal to get help and get his shit together. I don’t think I could go through more of all that depressed thinking in yet another book so I’m throwing in the towel on this series.
Grade: 1 out of 5
This book is available from Forever. You can purchase it here or here in e-format. This book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.