All I Want for Halloween by Marie Harte Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on September 26th 2017
Pages: 352
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
When Sadie Liberato is cajoled by her brother to attend a costume party a month before Halloween, she had no idea she'd fall for a handsome devil in a mask. Or that she'd have one hellishly fine encounter in the dark. But when her masked devil turns out to be Gear Blackstone, fallen TV reality star of the super popular show, Motorcycle Madnezz, she wonders if this is a match made in heaven or hell...
‘All I want for Halloween’ starts out fun and gossipy in a way about celebrities that had me laughing at the parody, then made it work by introducing a female lead who seemed to know just what she was doing, and yet was funny and gutsy to boot. And I’d thought there and then, that we had a winner.
After all, who can say that they’ve looked with disdain from afar, then came face to face with the very person you’ve been seeing on screen and been judgemental about? As someone watching from the outside, Sadie Liberato’s own reaction to the whole mess of a cheating ex and Motorcycle Madnezz’s end of an era on tv closely mirrored mine…minus the incidental meeting and the sexy times.
But past Gear’s and Sadie’s first (rather acrobatic) public, masked-sex at the party, it was hard to sustain interest in a pairing because I couldn’t tell just what direction their relationship was going to take. Throw in the sudden influx of characters in the midway point and the copious number of sex scenes—I really did get the point early on that sex between them was hot and stratospheric and got bored when that just went on and on—, it started to fall flat at the quarter-mark of the story, when Gear and Sadie find themselves in a semblance of dating but are convinced that they’re nothing more than that while their actions prove otherwise. Adamant that their ‘relationship’ is casual, much of it felt like lust masquerading as love still, even as both eventually do come to the conclusion that they are already there with their emotions.
Overall, I feel as though I should have liked this better than I did, but throughout it all, I simply found myself impatiently wanting to see the story get somewhere and was disappointed when it didn’t quite. Instead it dragged on and I finally started to skim, almost relieved when Gear/Sadie got it into their heads that they were on the same emotional page because that was where the story also ended.
