Review: Beside Your Heart by Mary Whitney

Title: Beside Your heart (Beside Your Heart #2) Author: Mary Whitney Genre: Contemporary Romance Release Date: June 16, 2013 Publisher: OmniFic Publishing Where to buy: Amazon | Barnes and Noble

 From Amazon:

Late one night, Nicki Johnson plays with emotional fire and Googles her high school love, only to find his name splashed across the British gossip columns. Back in his native England, Adam Kincaid is successful and dating a woman from an aristocratic family like his own. With a career in politics, Nicki's no slouch, but she knows Adam is living a world away from her life.

Yet there was a time he was no farther than the next locker. Nicki will never forget their year together in high school--the year of her sister's death, the year her mother checked out. Adam helped Nicki through suffocating grief, and she led him through coming of age. But when is a high school crush something more?

I received a copy of Beside Your Heart from a giveaway I won this past summer from The Novel Tease. I had yet to read it, but once I was given the opportunity to review the sequel to this book, Disclosure of the Heart, I decided it was high time I did.

I first have to say that I was slightly disappointed in the story over all, however not for the reasons one may think. It is a beautiful well-written story about first love and first heartbreak with all of the other firsts in between. The reason I was disappointed when I started reading this is because I judged from the summary that this would be a novel that explored a relationship between two adults that had started in high school. Nowhere was I lead to believe that the whole book would be a narrative of the characters of Nicki and Adam that takes place ENTIRELY in high school.

Buuuuut… maybe that’s just me?

The trickery (IMHO) begins after the first few chapters in which the author establishes that Nicki is an adult, wondering about that first love of her life, Adam, and wanting to catch up to what he’s doing now through her friends, Rachel and Lisa.

Abruptly the reader is thrown into a high school situation that stays there. I thought for sure at one point that the author was using the high school setting to explain in flashbacks about the past history shared between Nicki and Adam, but NO it’s the WHOLE BOOK. I would not want to mislead another reader into believing that Beside Your Heart is an entirely adult novel; it’s not.

Other than that, I liked the story; I felt that the story was thoughtful, heart breaking, beautiful and well written and had it’s moments that will stick with me.

One thing I did not like however was the ending of the story in which we finally get to see Adam as an adult, because it’s so abrupt and short, leaving the reader (or at least THIS reader) thinking “what the hell is going on now!”

Luckily I had access to the sequel, Disclosures of the Heart, that picks up immediately where Beside Your Heart leaves off, so it was a quick transition.

I think because of the fact that this book was not about what I was initially expecting, I would probably rate it lower than this; however it WAS a good story, I liked the characters, and I liked the flow. Over all Beside Your Heart rates:

Tomorrow I will be posting my review of Disclosure of the Heart, so I hope you all come back!