3 Smooches
Synopsis
SEX. LIES. SECRETS. DECEPTION.
Holden Danvers is the bad boy. The guy everyone warns you not to fall in love with. At twenty-two, he is a trust fund baby, rich enough to live his entire life without having to work and he uses that to his advantage.
Jamie Crawford can’t even talk to men, let alone have one-night stands. At twenty, she’s still a virgin and no one knows that because who would even believe her?
What happens when a seemingly fortuitous rendezvous in a hotel room changes their lives forever? And when Jamie realizes she’s falling for a guy she shouldn’t be falling for in a million years?
What happens when secrets unfold, and when lies and deception become their world?
IN A WORLD OF LIES, SECRETS AND DECEPTION, ALL YOU CAN HOPE FOR IS BROKEN LOVE.
#hashtag is a New Adult Romance about a group of friends who become trapped in a world of Lies, Sex and Deception. But when their love lives get tangled in the mess, they must find a way to fight the danger that surrounds them without hurting the person they are really, truly in love with and sometimes that means making sacrifices.
When you don’t know who’s lying and who isn’t, and when the lines of good and bad start to blur, will the friends be able to bury their secrets before the secrets bury them all?
How will they survive the online tabloid magazine #HASHTAG that seems hell bent on divulging the very secrets the friends are trying to protect? No one knows the true identity of the person they call #HT but it seems as though they are a little too obsessed with scandalizing the friends and revealing these secrets at the most inopportune times.
Review
Kady Hunt began this story by wading right into the thick of it. The problem for me was that I felt like I started in the middle of a story, and I had a hard time making sense of what was going on for nearly the entire first half of the book. There was just so much going on, I felt as though I couldn’t even blink because if I did I’d miss something important and then I’d never figure out what exactly was happening.
While I eventually got the gist of the plot, I’m definitely not comfortable enough with my understanding of it to recap it. The story was sometimes a little convoluted and, in parts, a bit unbelievable—at least for this jaded reader. It jumped around so much that it felt very disjointed and choppy. While this book mainly focused on Holden and Jamie, the points of view frequently shifted between the two of them AND Holden’s three friends—Teague, Sebastian and Daniel. Although this book is billed as as a romance, I felt that the romance was definitely a secondary subplot.
For the majority of this book, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something. I went back and reread parts often. The way the plot was unfolding wasn’t making sense to me, and as a result I didn’t really feel that I fully understood what was going on or why it was happening and as such, I had a hard time becoming invested in this story. I didn’t fully understand the relationships between the players, and because of that, I found it extremely difficult to connect with any of them. There are so many players, but without getting a back story on any of them, they felt underdeveloped to me.
The reason I’m comfortable giving Kady Hunt’s Perfect three smooches is because even though there are some crucial elements to this story that just didn’t work for me as a reader or for my personal reading preferences, I can still appreciate the quality of the author’s writing. It was strong, and I reacted strongly to it. There were so many twists and turns, and while I wasn’t a fan of all of them, the author still handled them well. Perfect is the first book in Hunt’s #Hashtag series, and I assume as each book releases more and more of this story will unfold, at least that’s what the set up in this book leads me to believe. My biggest problem was that there was just too much going on, and I was left with too many unanswered questions. This felt like a cliffhanger, and I personally don’t appreciate going into a cliffhanger without knowing that I am doing so. I was, however, intrigued by this story, enough so that I finished it, but in the end, I was left feeling a bit frustrated when I finished it.
It all boils down to my personal preferences, and the fact that this type of story isn’t quite my thing. But, if you don’t mind a story that will unfold over the course of multiple books, if you enjoy enough twists and turns to rival a carnival ride, and if you don’t mind waiting for your questions to be answered, then I’d recommend you give this book a try because it has all of that. As I stated, the writing was good and the story concept was intriguing, and for those reasons, I’m giving it 3 smooches.
~ Danielle Palumbo
