Friday, February 9, 2018

Review: Loving Mr. Daniels by Brittainy C. Cherry @BrittainyCherry


Title: Loving Mr. Daniels

Author: Brittainy C. Cherry

Publication date: May 11th, 2014

Pages: 310

ISBN: 9780692221914

Synopsis (according to Goodreads):
To Whom it May Concern,

It was easy to call us forbidden and harder to call us soulmates. Yet I believed we were both. Forbidden soulmates.

When I arrived to Edgewood, Wisconsin I didn't plan to find him. I didn't plan to stumble into Joe's bar and have Daniel's music stir up my emotions I had no clue that his voice would make me hurts forget their own sorrow. I had no idea that my happiness would remember its own bliss.

When I started senior year at my new school, I wasn't prepared to call him Mr. Daniels, but sometimes life happens at the wrong time for all the right reasons.

Our love story wasn't only about the physical connection.

It was about family. It was about loss. It was about being alive. It was silly. It was painful. It was mourning. It was laughter.

It was ours.

And for those reasons alone, I would never apologize for Loving Mr. Daniels.

- Ashlyn Jennings



Review:
I said I was going to give Brittainy Cherry another chance after I read her book "The Air He Breathes" and I stuck by my word. I was so glad that I did. "Loving Mr. Daniels" was the next book on the list on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited New Adult Romance. The opportunity to read another book by her was presented and I dove in.

Ashlyn has lost her best friend and sister all at once. She doesn't know what to do with herself as a part of her has suddenly been ripped away. Now, her mother has decided to send her to stay with her estranged father. Does anyone truly want Ashlyn in their life because from the way it seems everyone is trying to get away from her or push her away? Ashlyn  only has one thing to hold onto; letters and a bucket list written to her by her dead sister. Ashlyn manages to meet a man... boy... manboy, on the train to her new life and upon his invitation and a chance to knock something off her bucket list, she finds herself standing outside the bar waiting to see his band. After an unforeseeable panic attack and the comfort of this manboy named Daniel, Ashlyn starts to find reasons to smile again. This is until she walks into her new school and sees her favorite reason for standing at the front of the class wishing to be addressed as Mr. Daniels. Now Ashlyn must figure out how to resist her new teacher while not losing the first person who seems to understand her loss.

Daniel definitely understands loss. He has lost more people in his life than he cares to think about. Which is how he chooses to handle this fact; don't think about it. You can't hurt if you merely accept what has happened and move past it, right? But is there really any way to move past losing people who mean the world to you? And what about finding a kindred spirit only to find she is forbidden? Can he manage his past and keep his future intact by resisting Ashlyn or is he going to give into temptation and find solace in someone as equally as broken as he is?

Daniel was an indecisive ass hat in my opinion. He couldn't decide whether to break up with Ashlyn or be with her. He would pull her close, then push her away, then pull her close and promise forever, then tell her they can't be together. Ashlyn spends most of her time crying which got to be a bit of a pain in the ass. Ashlyn is fine, flip the page, and there she goes again. I swear if her tears were physically manifested my house would be called Atlantis. But that is all minor irritants and doesn't reflect on the meat and bones of the story. The teacher/student thing was interesting to watch unfold. The splitting of the main male character in Ashlyn's eyes between Daniel and Mr. Daniels was also a good way of showing the differences between professional and personal lifestyles. There was a lot of good in this book which outweighed the character flaws and the fast-paced writing that seems to be the norm with Brittainy. All-in-all, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and felt like crying a lot of the time right along with Ashlyn. Some of the writing was almost poetic. Shakespeare would have added a death scene or twelve but he'd be proud either way.

Loving Mr. Daniels tests the bounds of the taboo and makes it less shockworthy by adding a healthy dose of romance in the face of tragedy. 

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