Lovehood (5 - 10) by VanessaLain  

Reviewed by ESHurricane

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Overview

Lovehood follows Harley and her adventures from small childhood into her teen years and relationships with her peers and family. It flips point of view between her and her childhood friend Josiah, and eventually another character named Chris who incidentally hits her with a car.

Cover/Title

I adore the title of this book. I think it's clever and unique and very fitting for the story. It's one of those titles that is easy to remember and just sticks in your head. The cover is gorgeous, a simple tinted romantic photograph with the cover white and centered. Everything else is muted and elegant, and the symmetrical design draws my eyes right to the title in the middle.

Summary/Description

The summary is a nice introduction and gives a bit of mystery, hooking me in. However I'd rearrange and modify just a tiny bit, for grammar and flow. Something like:

Harley Charms had always craved love. She broke so many hearts, all of them were liable to destroy her. She fell prey to the deadliest of romances. The one with the stranger that saved her life.

Hook

The author requested I read chapters 5-10, so my hook was actually not at the beginning of the story, and surprisingly it was still there. Chapter five opens with Harley contemplating how and where she wants to die. It's dark and brutal and the stream-of-consciousness style writing with the long sentences makes it feel like I'm as drunk on depression as she is. It definitely makes me want to read on and find out why this poor girl has been driven to suicide and whether or not she walks the path of healing later.

Grammar/Structure

There aren't any glaring issues with grammar and structure, the only thing that really stood out to me was the dialogue tags.

Remember, when a tag denotes speaking (I said, he pleads, I cry) then the dialogue needs to flow into the tag with a comma. For example:

"Come home please," he pleads.

Or

"Let me take it out," I say, and she laughs.

When it doesn't denote speaking, then it's an action beat and it can be separate, like this:

"I love you." I terminate the call before he can ask me any questions.

Otherwise there were a few places where I wasn't capitalized or a comma or period were missing, but they seemed like typos and not necessarily errors due to lack of knowledge.

Characters

From the brief chapters, the characters feel fleshed out. With the POV changes it's easy to slip into each character and their narrative voices are fairly clear. Harley uses flowery language and long sentences. Josiah is more choppy with shorter sentences and a no-nonsense tone. The one chapter I got of Chris was fantastic, I loved the way he chastised and argued with himself.

The author has done a great job here of really giving these characters concise personalities through their inner monologue.

Narrative

I'm normally not into POV changes, but here I think it's used effectively. Even though this is clearly Harley's story, it's both refreshing and interesting to get the chapters from the other characters' perspectives. Especially because it's not just the same scenes over and over, the blend in and out around similar timelines but it doesn't really repeat anything. If anything it adds to what I thought I knew reading a scene.

I especially liked Chris' chapter, and how it started with him freaking out over hitting a girl with his car, after getting Harley's chapter where she was about to jump from the cliff. I wasn't sure what happened at the end, but then reading Chris' chapter was intense. It definitely took what I thought I knew from Harley's (which was she got hit by a car randomly on the side of a cliff), gave me insight into Chris' character, and then explained why she got hit by a car in a creative way. Well done!

Plot/Pacing

I like the pacing in this story, from the five chapters I read. It's not exactly chronological, which I like. From what I can tell this book is a teen romance, and while I'm not opposed to that, teen romance seems to follow certain cliches and paths that I just don't often find interesting having read as much of it as I have.

But with this format, and the focus on narrative voice and the story being so character driven, I definitely was sucked into learning about these characters. The author is definitely connected to and invested in her characters and it shows on the page. Flipping back and forth between points of view and timeline (from teenage years to five years old and back again) kept me on my toes and constantly asking questions, which is a pace that I love.

Closing Comments

Overall, very intrigued by this story! It was really hard to stop to write this review instead of just reading on to find out what was going to happen to Harley. I think with a light edit to tighten up a few of the things I mentioned grammar wise that this book could really shine.