Review: Always You

Always You by Ruth Roberts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was so hopeful at the sounds and start of this one...

I received my copy of this eBook in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Zack had gone to get some punch and was taking longer than she expected. She decided to go looking for him. She quickly found him, kissing her stepsister. She must have made a startled sound because Zack turned to look at her, and the color drained from his face. "It's not what you think, Diana," he said.

She didn't want to hear anymore. She lifted her dress and ran away from him as fast as she could. The last thing she saw was the satisfied grin on Liz's face. Her perfect night had ended in heartache.

The things that happen to us as teens seem to colour and stick with us throughout our lives. Diana had a mother than abandoned her, a father that worked too much and then fell hard for a woman with a daughter that was the same age. When Liz and her mother came to live with them, Diana had these beautiful dreams of a sister - someone that could be her confidante and friend, someone to share the world with and her home with so that she would never be alone. She'd gone out of her way to make this new stepsister welcome, but in the end she got the wicked stepsister from fairy stories. Liz had wanted nothing to do with her, in fact she only wanted to make Diana suffer.

By the time the girls had grown, the rift was so large that they only saw each other on random family gatherings despite living in the same city. That they shared a younger sister and each a father and mother was beyond the point. Diana wanted nothing to do with Liz, but Liz was beginning to see the error of her selfish ways. When the death of their parents brings these young women back to Magnolia Falls to raise their half sibling in their family home together, I was completely unprepared for what happened!

I've ranked this as 3 stars, it's somewhere between 3 and 4, though, but it falls closer to the "round down" option to me than the "round up." The rating is based on the ending, because the pacing didn't seem at all right to me. I found the ending, where Diana went to get Zack back too abrupt - and there wasn't anything to hold up as an epilogue of sorts to show how she held up. As Liz and Diana's love stories were happening concurrently, I can sort of understand how that would happen, but I think it didn't do them justice.

I enjoyed all of this story - I really did - but I found the rush at the end to solve the heart ache of the women just too fast to be believed. I also kind of felt that there was a little too much going on - I was more interested in Logan and Liz many times than I was in the goings on of Diana and Zack. Poor little Jessica seemed like an afterthought, and she also seemed like being five or six was too young to have a lawyer for a sister and a supermodel.

I may give the next a shot, only just to see if there is something to show what happens to Zack and Diana as well as how Liz wins back Logan.

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