I read this book b/c I've heard nothing but great things about it. I wish I agreed with all the wonderful reviews, but I don't. I think the author is a great story teller, but the story was so incredibly flawed.
This suffered from poor editing or no editing at all. The grammatical errors were so icredibly distracting. There were sentences everywhere that just didn't make any sense at all. Santo was vexed by the women? Um, that means annoyed. Just didn't work. It was overly repetetive also. I kept thinking "you just said that two times before in the same paragraph". The abrupt changes in POV... the lack of contractions made the dialogue sound stilted and unnatural. The inconsistencies with names was bothersome. Pyshco Kelly became Layla. Mattock was with Dr. Dana, but later its Amber. Call me nitpicky, but things like that take me out of the narrative. Maybe it was just the ebook version, though. Hopefully.
But what really killed this book for me was the portrayal of the characters themselves. What was the moral of the story: Don't marry the lying, manipulative, cheating asshole only if someone else offers to marry you in his place? I felt for Ivy initially, when I thought she was just young and naive. But she crossed the line into just plain stupid.
And Grey did NOT deserve the reader's (or the writer's) sympathy in any way. This is man that cheated on his fiancee for the entirety of their relationship, but he gets applauded for sticking by her when she got pregnant, AFTER he broke up with her. Seriously??!! He deserved his comeuppance, not a seat in Congress. Its like reading a Greek tragedy; you're supposed to get a feeling of catharsis at the end, and I didn't get that. I was still waiting for Ivy to grow a back bone and kick his ass, not cheer for his victory. All the other characters talked to her about standing up for herself and being independent and that never happened. How many times did she apologize to Grey when it should've been the other way around? And she should've been the one begging Nicola to marry her. Somewhere in this story, she needed to be single and grow up.