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The One For You by Roni Loren

Posted on 10th October 20191st October 2019 by Dísir

The One for You by Roni Loren
Series: The Ones Who Got Away, #4
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on 31st December 2019
Pages: 448
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three-stars

Sassy Kincaid Breslin finally gets her happy ending...

She got a second chance at life.
Will she take a second chance at love?

Kincaid Breslin wasn't supposed to survive that fateful night at Long Acre when so many died, including her boyfriend—but survive she did. She doesn't know why she got that chance, but now she takes life by the horns and doesn't let anybody stand in her way

Ashton Isaacs was her best friend when disaster struck all those years ago, but he chose to run as far away as he could. Now fate has brought him back to town, and Ash doesn't know how to cope with his feelings for Kincaid and his grief over their lost friendship. For Ash has been carrying secrets, and he knows that once Kincaid learns the truth, he'll lose any chance he might have had with the only woman he's ever loved.

Following the characters of a fictional town that still bears the scars of a school shooting over a decade ago has put Roni Loren on my radar. 4 books into the series, Loren still tells powerful stories of what it means to grieve, to nurture memories that are both good and bad, and even to tell oneself certain reconstructed tales laced with rum so that life gets easier to deal with as the years go by.

‘The One For You’ seems like Roni Loren’s final book of a difficult and poignant series, closing with Kincaid Breslin’s book and honestly, this was a harder, angstier one to take in than the rest. A series of events brings old school best-friends back together again, forcing them to face some unfinished business between them as they wade through the unpleasant memories that time and space can’t erase. The rest is predictable—Ash and Kincaid rediscover their own friendship, only with a dose of attraction and lust, with a big reveal towards the end of what really went down all those years ago that would again, make or break this fragile thread linking them once more.

Impulsive, flighty and so self-absorbed, I found Kincaid a different kettle of fish to even warm up to, let alone with her thoughtless hookups and actions that made others pay for the consequences. Constantly moving, surrounding herself with people, it felt as though she couldn’t even, for one moment centre herself and figure out what she really needed, having already sold herself the delusion of losing her one and only soulmate to the school shooting, then later back-pedalling when she realised it was supposedly her best friend for her after all. Not fighting for Ash, pettily looking at faults she could find with him even after all he’d done for her, so hell-bent on independence that she shaped up as someone who put herself first only.

Instead, I felt for Ash’s pining and his prolonged pain, especially as he kept on being second-best but never the first choice. That was rough, the way he’d held out for Kincaid and watched out for her time and again with her flaunting her dates in his face, and then later being so thick (and possibly in constant denial) in the way she kept seeing through him. In essence, he deserved better.

It did feel like a cop-out after all, at the end of the book when the love declarations came flowing in fast and furious, where Loren tried to sell the idea of Kincaid and Ash as the OTP. And that ironically, was hard to buy into since the whole book was already spent detailing how Kincaid didn’t quite seem to have a heart for Ash at all the way he did for her.

It isn’t to say that this isn’t a decent book considering the overarching narrative – my own issue with characterisation aside. Loren handles the aftermath of violence, the process of rebuilding and the coming to terms with stuff with a lot of grace and class, with a watertight HEA for all. The fairy-tale ending is given to her bunch of characters who vowed to live their lives to the fullest after the tragedy, and it’s with that upbeat note that the series anyway—with the message that there is hope and a happiness that even tragedy can’t take away.

The One You Fight For by Roni Loren

Posted on 1st November 201827th October 2018 by Dísir

The One You Fight For by Roni Loren
Series: The Ones Who Got Away, #3
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on 1st January 2019
Pages: 416
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four-half-stars

How hard would you fight for the one you love? Taryn Landry was there that awful night fourteen years ago when Long Acre changed from the name of a town to the title of a national tragedy. Everyone knows she lost her younger sister. No one knows it was her fault. Since then, psychology professor Taryn has dedicated her life's work to preventing something like that from ever happening again. Falling in love was never part of the plan...

Shaw Miller has spent more than a decade dealing with the fallout of his brother's horrific actions. After losing everything―his chance at Olympic gold, his family, almost his sanity―he's changed his name, his look, and he's finally starting a new life. As long as he keeps a low profile and his identity secret, everything will be okay, right?

When the world and everyone you know defines you by one catastrophic tragedy...How do you find your happy ending?

The tragedy of Long Acre mirrors so much of the contemporary violence in schools but I’ve never read a romance series that details the lives of those who actually live on in the aftermath of it—and how a single, catastrophic event drastically alters everything they’ve done or believed in.

In ‘The One You Fight For’, Taryn Landry and Shaw Miller—victims in their own right as siblings of the victim and the perpetrator of the shooting—still find themselves reeling from the events more than a decade ago, still paying in their own ways for what they perceive as their penance for playing a part for what went down and upturned their lives. For all of Loren’s focus on the victims and the fallout of the shooting in her previous books, I hadn’t considered at all, how close relatives would have dealt with this and Loren finally forces this into the limelight with Shaw/Taryn taking centre stage in this instalment.

Shaw and Taryn meet in a series of serendipitous events that took a number of twists and turns getting there: from an anonymous song at a bar, to a run where Taryn collapses and eventually signs up at a ninja-warrior-type gym where Shaw and his friend are setting up.

Loren’s brilliance at portraying brokenness and the ‘relatability’ of characters however, is as heartbreaking as it is compelling to read about: each of her protagonists, guilty for the small things they thought they’d done to contribute to the tragedy, each trying to make up for their perceived culpability in their own ways.

What moved me the most however, was the utterly downtrodden Shaw, who couldn’t see beyond the need to punish himself for something he didn’t commit for his entire life: for being related to the shooter is by proxy meant that he was guilty as charged, for how he’d never been able to shrug away the stigma, at the abuse he’d received from so many (the sharp, acid tongue from Taryn notwithstanding when she said some cruel things), for the yearning to only be ‘normal’.

I had a sort of inkling how this would go down from start to end. Taryn and Shaw aren’t hostile rivals to begin with, but what binds them is something more devastating and perhaps even notoriously taboo in the place where they live.

Conflict after conflict seem to await them up to a point where their loyalties are stretched and pulled in different directions, to the extent where the climax is a predictable one from the lead-ins and hints that have been given, as is their bittersweet resolution. Taryn/Shaw’s rather abrupt epilogue is hard-won nonetheless, though I did somehow wish for a more-iron-clad one that’s more inferred than given past the last page.

The One You Can’t Forget by Roni Loren

Posted on 5th April 201812th April 2018 by Dísir

The One You Can't Forget by Roni Loren
Series: The Ones Who Got Away, #2
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on June 5th 2018
Pages: 416
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four-stars

Most days Rebecca Lindt feels like an imposter...The world admires her as a survivor. But that impression would crumble if people knew her secret. She didn't deserve to be the one who got away. But nothing can change the past, so she's thrown herself into her work. She can't dwell if she never slows down.

Wes Garrett is trying to get back on his feet after losing his dream restaurant, his money, and half his damn mind in a vicious divorce. But when he intervenes in a mugging and saves Rebecca―the attorney who helped his ex ruin him―his simple life gets complicated.

Their attraction is inconvenient and neither wants more than a fling. But when Rebecca's secret is put at risk, both discover they could lose everything, including what they never realized they needed: each other

She laughed and kissed him. This morning she'd melted down. But somehow this man had her laughing and turned on only a few hours later. Everything inside her felt buoyed.

She felt...light.

She'd forgotten what that felt like.

‘The One You Can’t Forget’ isn’t a title that lends itself to easy guessing—one could be forgiven for thinking this is a typical second-chance romance when it really isn’t quite—but the unique context in which school-massacre survivors rebuild their lives brick by brick has put Roni Loren on the book map for me.

For Rebecca Lindt, the woman who’d physically escaped the school shooting, but remains mentally fettered by it years later, ‘The One you Can’t Forget’ is pretty much her story. Despite the book being a romance between a disgraced chef and a staid lawyer who’d a painful teenage school dream and had it shattered underfoot, only to find love again much later, it’s also a story that I can get more or less behind, because it’s probably the most realistic type of narrative out there that states love (with a different person) can be found again, in a different time, in a different context entirely.

The kind of mediated response Rebecca had to the world as she got lost in her career, the so-called philosophical musings she had concerning love and life, the complexity of survivor guilt, the lingering effects of PTSD, and the slow steps back into getting into a relationship with a person who’d once come and gone in her life are what Loren expresses very well. I just wished she had more courage where Wes was concerned, though that was (incidentally) resolved through an untimely interruption that proved to be the last straw that broke the camel’s back for them.

It was impossible not to like Wes just as much though, considering he was a protagonist who was as well-crafted as Rebecca with his own motivations and his own demons, yet had gone through the tunnel with a clear vision of the mistakes he made and the precious insight he’s gained from them. That he talked about them, laid out his feelings for Rebecca and stepped bravely out of his own comfort zones? Absolutely brilliant. In fact, I loved seeing every step of his growth and the uptick of his fortunes the moment he and Rebecca crossed paths…which Loren almost writes as kismet.

If I wasn’t entirely sold on Loren’s first book, ‘The One You Can’t Forget’ definitely worked out better for me, with an epilogue that’s tooth-achingly happy and a wrap-up that made me think that Wes/Rebecca’s hard-earned HEA was nothing but well-deserved.

The Ones Who Got Away by Roni Loren

Posted on 20th December 201717th December 2017 by Dísir

The Ones Who Got Away by Roni Loren
Series: The Ones Who Got Away #1
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on January 2nd 2018
Pages: 384
Buy on Amazon
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three-stars

Liv's words cut off as Finn got closer. The man approaching was nothing like the boy she'd known. The bulky football muscles had streamlined into a harder, leaner package and the look in his deep green eyes held no trace of boyish innocence.

It's been twelve years since tragedy struck the senior class of Long Acre High School. Only a few students survived that fateful night—a group the media dubbed The Ones Who Got Away.

Liv Arias thought she'd never return to Long Acre—until a documentary brings her and the other survivors back home. Suddenly her old flame, Finn Dorsey, is closer than ever, and their attraction is still white-hot. When a searing kiss reignites their passion, Liv realizes this rough-around-the-edges cop might be exactly what she needs...

I’d be hard-pressed to say that the second-chance romance trope is one that’s always believable or easy to swallow. Roni Loren however, presents one of the most unusual and unique premises for reconciliation and reunion that this particular trope gains firm standing in circumstances wrought by extreme trauma that you can’t help but accept and understand why people can and do go their separate ways.

PTSD isn’t a cut and dried issue according to Loren and not typically confined to just the military heroes that seem to walk around bearing this tag in romantic fiction. It’s complicated and not just something that’s shrugged away. Reactions to trauma differ and for this reason, Liv and Finn struggle in their own ways (she through the self-destructive habits of drunkenness and promiscuity and Finn by channelling his efforts into law enforcement) to cope. Yet both are realistically flawed and behave in a way that shows a type of maturity that goes beyond just growing up.

I liked Finn more than I liked Liv and clearly my own preference is rearing its head here—I generally find it hard to sympathise with characters who are self-destructive in the way that they use people sexually to self-medicate while lacking the self-respect and dignity to get therapy until they hit rock bottom. Liv’s reckless, loose-cannon-type personality that was a front for running away (Loren reminds us of this quite a few times about the many men she went through), in contrast to Finn’s driving need to right this particular aspect of society’s wrongs, felt more self-indulgent than beneficial (in the way Finn had centred his own career around it) even though those demons driving the both of them were essentially the same.

If the first quarter of the story was stellar however, I thought the pacing lagged a little in the middle as Finn and Liv danced around the same issues of wanting more but not wanting to step out to make the out-of-the-comfort-zone decision. After Finn/Liv agreeing to spend the weekends together, I thought the plot didn’t seem to move forward very much, up until the point at the end where they finally decided to give a real relationship a go.

Loren’s evocative writing nonetheless, brings to light the complexity of these struggles and the impossibility of outrunning these traumatic memories. It’s a series I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for and I can’t wait to see what tropes Loren will write into her next few books.