Review: Falling Into You – Jasinda Wilder

I wasn’t always in love with Colton Calloway; I was in love with his younger brother, Kyle, first. Kyle was my first one true love, my first in every way.
Then, one stormy August night, he died, and the person I was died with him.

Colton didn’t teach me how to live. He didn’t heal the pain. He didn’t make it okay. He taught me how to hurt, how to not be okay, and, eventually, how to let go.

Series: Falling into You #1
Release Date: March 16, 2013
Publisher: Seth Clarke
Source: Amazon via my own wallet
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Reviewer’s Thoughts

I’ve held off reading this book for a few weeks because I needed to be in a place where I could emotionally deal with the content of this book.  I knew what was going to happen.  Kyle was going to die.  The only question was when it was going to happen in the story and (for me) just how emotionally devastating this was going to be.

If you follow the blog, you know that I have been on a New Adult kick. I like how emotionally challenging and gritty the titles I’ve picked up are. I figured, based on the buzz for this book, that this would absolutely fit into group of books I’ve been reading. I won’t lie….there are some really, really tough moments.

Nell is absolutely, positively broken by the death of Kyle. She’s closed all her emotions off and lives in this place where the only thing she feels is pain and guilt. Her feelings are understandable. Her family’s lack of intervention are not. At the beginning of the book, I was given a feeling that Nell was close with her parents. Even if her father is a hard-assed CEO during the day, they seemed like a close family and one that would intervene if their only child seemed to be on a downward spiral. As we met up with Nell in present day and saw how much she had changed after Kyle’s death, I had to wonder just why her parents weren’t doing something to help her because it was fairly obvious that she was floundering. Luckily for Nell, Kyle’s older brother, Colton, crosses paths with her and is able to help Nell start to deal with a lot of her issues.

Colt was special. For the son of a prominent Congressman, he had a truly horrible, horrible late teen/early twenties. He’d done some things he wasn’t proud of, but it was what he needed to do to survive when his family turned it’s back on him. Colt has a very skewed vision of himself because it’s tainted by his parents perception of him, the demons of his past and what he thinks is his lack of worth. With Nell, he recognizes a person in pain and he wants to help her let go of her pain and learn to deal with Kyle’s death. His persistance with Nell made me love him. I wanted Colt to find a way to truly be happy and to let go of all the crap that occurred in his past.  He had a way of compartmentalizing things he didn’t want to deal with and sometimes Nell went into her own little box.  But Colt was trying to dig himself out and finding that happy place.

I liked the story and I liked both characters.  They were both (story and characters) were incredibly complex.  The only thing that was holding me back from loving this book was the response from both Nell and Colt’s families.  I really needed to see, the families reaching out.  To let Nell flounder they way she did was inexcusable to me.  She can be broken and not responsive, but they should have been on her to get help.  Then there was Colt’s family.  There was more there that needed to be said between Colt and his parents and we never got it.  There was the attempted apology, but that only scratches the surface of their family issues.  I’m hoping that with the upcoming release, FALLING INTO US, the author give us that insight so I can feel like everyone was on the road to a better place and not hanging in a sort of “Maybe I’m OK” limbo.