Review: Scandalous – H. M Ward

One kiss could have changed Abby’s life, but when it didn’t happen, she ran. Jack was everything to her and when he didn’t respond, Abby couldn’t bear it. Everything about that night–leaning in close to his face, feeling the night breeze teasing her hair, the way his scent filled her head–was burned vividly into her mind, including the moment when Jack pulled away. There was no kiss. Abby was wrong. She was wrong about him, wrong about them.

Maybe she didn’t have to go to college two thousand miles away, but she did. She had to forget about him. Abby threw herself off the grid, disappearing completely from the life she knew. After completing her undergraduate degree, she enrolled in seminary. All contact with her old life was severed and she never looked back, until she was forced to.
When Abby puts idealism into practice, her congregation throws her out. If she can survive a year on her own, they’ll take her back, and continue to pay off her student loans–but if she fails, Abby is on her own with enough debt to fund a small town. Seminary wasn’t cheap. With no place left to go, Abby returns to New York and her best friend takes her in.

Desperate to make it on her own and prove she was right, Abby follows a job lead to an art studio on Long Island. It isn’t until she hears Jack’s voice that she freezes. The hairs on the back of her neck prickle as she turns to see Jack, ten years later, looking even more tempting than before.
Fate is cruel. Abby left this life behind, but she’s thrown back into it, head first. It’s like someone hit rewind on her life and its ten years earlier. She’s the cotton-mouthed girl that she always was around Jack, and now her future relies on the man who rejected her.

Series:
Release Date:  May 1, 2012
Publisher:  Laree Bailey Press
Source:  Amazon, via my own wallet
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Reviewer’s Thoughts:

Girl likes boy.  Girl tries to kiss boy.  Boy doesn’t try to kiss girl.  Girl runs off to Texas and become a nun.  Seems kind of extreme just because a boy you like doesn’t kiss you back, but this is how Scandalous starts out.

Abby tried to kiss Jack when they were seniors in high school.  She goes 90% When he doesn’t make an attempt to go the remaining 10% and actually touch lips with her, she leaves him and runs for Texas and the seminary.  Ten years later, Abby finds herself on a forced sabbatical with no money, no job and forced to move back to New York and sponge of her best friend (who she’s also not spoken to in ten years).  In hopes of repaying her ginormous student loan debt, she gets a job as an artist’s assistant…who just happens to be Jack.  Back in Jack’s universe, Abby begins to question her choices and wonders if being by Jack’s side was where she was meant to be.

There was something about this book the caught my eye when I found it on Amazon.  Maybe it was the cover, the book blurb or even the price…but something drew me in.  I only wish I knew what it was, because it didn’t live up to the hype my mind created for it.

As I started the story, I thought it was extreme that Abby would run off and become a nun rather than face Jack’s rejection.  Even stranger was the fact that she would cut off contact with her best friend for ten years.  But Abby was a quirky character.  She overanalyzed things and didn’t really know how to deal with her emotions.  But I always felt like I was missing something about Abby.  We got a hint of her childhood, but I kept waiting for more information about her parents and her home life to explain why she was the way she was.  Unfortunately, we never got it.

Then there was Jack.  He’s a famous artist known for his sensual and somewhat erotic pieces.  Knowing Abby is a nun, he hires her to be his assistant.  An assistant who much watch him paint nude woman.  Hello!  I’m not a prude, but that seemed a little over the top for me.  But even more perplexing was Abby’s reaction to not so much the naked women, but to Jack himself.  It was clear she had unresolved feelings as far as Jack was concerned and for someone who was so hell bent on going back to her parish in Texas, I couldn’t wrap my head around why she would work for him when what he represented meant disaster for her professionally and personally.

I struggled with this story.  Not because Abby was a nun or because of Jack.  I struggled because I couldn’t connect with Abby or understand why she did some of the things she did.  She ran, from many things, and didn’t seem to have the inner piece one would think someone would have after making the life decision she made (I’m assuming one doesn’t make the decision to become a nun lightly).  I wanted to be sympathetic towards her, but at times I just found myself shaking my head and hoping the story moved along faster.

This said, the erotic elements to the story were fabulous.  The painting/photography scenes with Jack and Abby saved this book for me.  I only wish there were more of them, because those seemed to be the only time either character were truly happy and enjoyable.