Taking Shots by Toni Aleo
No matter how hard she tries, Eleanor Fisher never thinks she’s good enough, from her job to her weight to her love life. After enduring years of abuse at the hands of an ex-boyfriend, Elli has been drifting through life in a daze. Until, that is, she meets Shea Adler on a promotional shoot for the NHL’s Nashville Assassins. Before Elli knows what’s happening, the gorgeous Shea breaks the ice and shatters her world.
A brilliant athlete inside the rink, Shea Adler is tired of the life he’s living outside of it: the girls, the money, the drinking. But everything changes when he meets Elli. After laying eyes on this feisty, witty, beautiful woman, he feels like he’s just taken the hardest hit of his life. No matter how skeptical she is, Shea knows they are meant to be together—if only he can convince Elli to put her insecurities aside before she misses out on a shot at love.
I kind of stumbled upon this book by accident one day. I was searching on Amazon for something to read, I read the blurb and thought, well I love hockey and romance so why not give it a shot?
I'm so glad that I did!
My mind was absolutely blown that this was a debut novel. I thought the plot was great, the characters were well developed and the conflicts were somewhat realistic. The first time I read this book, there were some things that needed to be fixed. The spelling and grammatical errors were kind of annoying after a while, but this book has been reedited since.
Let's start off with Shea. I really liked his character because of the fact that he wasn't some mysoginistic jerk that liked to treat women like absolute garbage for no reason. Yes, in the book it points out that he was rather premiscuious but he wasn't mean about it, like a lot of the other popular male characters everyone is swooning about. I enjoyed learning about his character and I feel like Toni went into great depth explaining all the different things about him throughout the whole book.
Now we get to Elli. I have to be honest, she kind of drove me insane at times. We learn that she used to be this thin, stereotypical beautiful women that depended on her looks for a career. She gets sick and gains a lot of weight, moves back home and starts up her own business that is built on passion alone. She ends up alone for a long time because of issues with her body image and overall self esteem. The reason she started to annoy me throughout the book was because I was getting annoyed with reading about her insecurities when it came to her body and what she looked like, don't get me wrong, I have read far worse when it comes to this topic but if I had to make one small change, that is what I would change.
The reasons I loved this book was because it was so fictional and kind of happy fantasy on one end, but then it had some realistic factors, like women dealing with body image and problems throughout the relationship based on insecurities.
There is one thing I have heard a lot about when it comes to this story, and that was the length and the amount of detail that was given to us. I personally really loved this. I love really long books and I get excited when they are over 400 pages because I get so much character build up and detail!
Overall, I give this book 4 bubbles. I really, really liked it. It was a fun, light read that was entertaining. There is no cliffhanger but it is part of a series. The series is focused on different characters and you do get to read small details about Elli in Shea in the other books.
No comments:
Post a Comment