Embrace the Fire

Ummm ... well ... this one kind of didn't work for me. Sorry. Catching up with the others, who populate this world, was the best part for me. The thing is that the main couple? I didn't particularly care or was invested in them, through no fault of their own. We just didn't click. Perhaps it was a case of too much and too little at once.

Brandon, like his brothers, Luke & Ash, fled to NYC, and overcame steep odds, becoming a teacher. However due to trauma and fear he hides, alone, and isolated. When a fellow teacher urges him to volunteer at the youth outreach center he meets Tash and it's love at first sight. There's much protesting from Tash: their age difference, lingering self doubt, and trust issues from a past relationship etc. There's also a non stop barrage of well meaning friends & relatives who are just busybodies adding their two cents when no one asked them. That's family, I guess. The problem is that between these other people, the wrapping up of story lines that came from bks. 1 & 2, and Tash & Brandon's long internal monologues, ruminating on the past or speculating on what the other might think, drowned out any possibility for caring or believing in them as a couple. I didn't hate them. I just didn't care about them.

If you've read the other two books in the series there's a nice, extended epilogue, with codas for the couples we've met along the way. That was very nice and heartwarming.