What did I think...
Outside the Ropes by Ashley Claudy
Description:
In the ring, Regan has control. Outside the ropes, she fights to survive.
Regan Sommers spent her life fighting. Fighting foster parents, kids in the group home, and classmates. But the night she has to fight for her life changes everything.
Now, she's fighting for money in the ring, and from the first punch she's addicted. Every addiction has a price though, and this one is the gym's star boxer, Gage Lawson. He may come in an enticing tattooed package, but his demands are more than she can handle.
The responding officer from that night, Anthony Fields, comes with no demands. He wants whatever she's willing to give, and Regan can handle that. She can definitely handle him.
But no help comes string free, and Regan's not the only one with a hard past and scars to cover. The life she was trying to escape is nothing compared to the danger she's in the middle of now, and she can't fight her way out.
***Reader please be aware: Story contains mature content such as: Drugs, sex, abuse, and explicit language that may be upsetting for some.****
Regan Sommers spent her life fighting. Fighting foster parents, kids in the group home, and classmates. But the night she has to fight for her life changes everything.
Now, she's fighting for money in the ring, and from the first punch she's addicted. Every addiction has a price though, and this one is the gym's star boxer, Gage Lawson. He may come in an enticing tattooed package, but his demands are more than she can handle.
The responding officer from that night, Anthony Fields, comes with no demands. He wants whatever she's willing to give, and Regan can handle that. She can definitely handle him.
But no help comes string free, and Regan's not the only one with a hard past and scars to cover. The life she was trying to escape is nothing compared to the danger she's in the middle of now, and she can't fight her way out.
***Reader please be aware: Story contains mature content such as: Drugs, sex, abuse, and explicit language that may be upsetting for some.****
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Series: Outside the Ropes
Published on: January 1st, 2015
Pages: 438 pages
Format: ebook, Digital PDF
Source: NetGalley
Average rating: 4.13
My rating: 1.5 stars
This is going to be a short one...
I'm going to start by saying that I did not enjoy Outside the Ropes in the least, and after two weeks of forcing myself to pick it up, only to set in back down in favor of actually doing work (I know, it says a lot, doesn't it?), I will officially mark it as a DNF.
The description sounded very interesting, but even after I clicked the "Request" button of NetGalley's, I started second guessing myself.
The main reason I didn't like the book: The writing.
The writing in a story is everything. I've read books where the plot wasn't very good, but the writing was amazing, and I still thoroughly enjoyed the book because the writing was making me laugh my ass off *cough* Charley Davidson *cough*.
The writing in this was just very... flimsy and non-genuine. Instead of being immersed into the story, I felt like I was staring at a drawing of a rectangle and being told it was a cube.
The Characters are a different story. I've never read anything from this author before, so I have nothing to compare it to, and I don't know if she procrastinated until two days before the deadline to write the parts of these books, but I felt the authors desperation for the writing and the characters big time.
The characters seemed very superficial, in the way of personality, and the "passion" (or lack thereof) between Gage and Regan just seemed very surface an overdramatized, not to mention how tired reading about them made me. Gage, as both a character and a lover, was very disappointing. Miss Claudy tried very hard to make him this solid, unmovable force of closed-offness, to make him seem like the biggest jackass ever and made him the "cute off from the world by his own making" kind of guy. Yes, you know the type; very cliché. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. This didn't. Unfortunately, her efforts were very obvious in the writing and instead of trying to develop her characters as people, she wrote them as puppets. Gage just sounded and looked so ridiculous in reading and mind, that I'm almost embarrassed to admit that anytime he opened is mouth, my eyes were rolling- rotten teenager style. I have to admit, when I started this book, I was worried about Regan. The really strong, fighter chicks are often over-written and very unenjoyable... which is exactly what happened. She tried so hard to make Regan this strong, surviving person that she came across to me (on the "inside) as impetuous, needy and fake, which was very much unenjoyable.
I also like to be able to differentiate between my characters... but Regan and Gage were so similar... that I could never picture them together, doing anything but maybe having sex... even when scenes were written where they were doing other things, which is never good.
Bottom line, I didn't even pay much attention to the content here because the writing makes of break a book... and I'm afraid this book is pretty broken.
XOXO,
Kat
