Review: Heartless by Ivy Fox

Heartless by Ivy Fox

Series: The Privileged of Pembroke High #1

Publication date: July 25th, 2019

Pages: 393

Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️

Synopsis:

I had their love once.

They saw me for the girl I am and the person I yearn to become one day--a woman who thrives in her freedom and dances away in her rightfully earned independence.

They saw all the strong, unafraid parts of me, and coaxed each one of them out, daring me to dream bigger, climb higher.

They never once saw the girl I had been groomed to see in the mirror.

The abandoned daughter of a dead man. 

The unwanted child of a woman who despised her.

The broken body formed wrong and built on a shaky foundation, threatening to fall apart and shatter.

They made all the ugliness disappear and left only wonder and promise. The love we shared for each other was probably the only miracle I would be granted in this life, and I knew they felt the same.

Or so I thought.

Everything I held dear has been robbed from me, and I've been a victim of theft too many times to mention.

I will not have them steal my pride.

They can keep my heart, for all I care.

The day they become my stepbrothers, it stopped working anyway.

Heartless is the first book in The Privileged of Pembroke High series which ends in a cliffhanger.

This is a #whychoose contemporary romance, full-length novel.

*Recommended 18+ due to mature language, adult situations, and sensitive content.

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Review:

All Holland wanted in her life was to be who she truly was without the stigma of her family being attached to it. It's why she was homeschooled by her grandmother while her mother wanted nothing to do with her and her father passed away. But one day she was summoned to her mother's side and that is where she was demanded to stay. The why of the situation never sat well with Holland but there was nothing she could do to fight against her abusive mother. The only reprieve she had from her torturous life was her job at a local diner. She took the job with her father's permission to explore the world and see how the other half live. But she stayed because she started to make friends with the locals and even met a few boys that she was quickly growing fond of. It should have been the perfect last summer at her job. Her boys were back in town from New York and it was time for her to decide whether they were going to have a future together or not. But before she can decide one way or the other her life gets flipped upside down. Now the boys she once loved look at her with distain and disgust. Her mother is to marry their father and her secret is out. She is not the townie they thought she was but another of the privileged few. And now they have decided to make her wish she had never hid the truth from them at all.

This book started so rocky that I almost DNFed it straight out the gate. There was no lead up to the twins and Holland being together, they just already were from the first pages. It was a bit hard to follow what was going on and why she was hiding out at the diner or why her mother was just a grade-A bitch. It was dull and boring and it took me far too long to get through the book because I was just struggling with how it began. It was like starting in the middle of a story already being told. I thought I had missed a prequel or something beforehand that would have explained the whole dynamic better. 

Add to that the fact that I couldn't connect with Holland. She had no spark, no fire, and no will to fight for the boys who started ghosting her. She just rolled over and pouted at the moon like it would suddenly assist her in some way. I felt if she really wanted to be with the twins she would have moved hell and high water to find out why they had suddenly disappeared on her. Instead she just went with it and when they came back with no explanation she was willing to just go right back to where they had been before the fall out. She seemed weak and I really didn't care for her at all. Over time that started to change but that was more so done in the next installments rather than this book.

I would say that the ending was the saving grace. It showed a lot more depth than the entire rest of the book all together. And it finally gave the characters something real to brood over. Up until this point they really had no reason to be all ticked off. It was just stilly. The ending is what made me continue to read. And I am pretty glad I did because there is hope for the series. So, my advice would be to push through this book so you can get to the rest.