♥♥♥ 5 beautiful, Hope-filled stars!!♥♥♥
Well, it's official. CoHo has done it again with Losing Hope. Now, I know most you are probably sick of this alternate POV trend as I was. I mean, why not write a book with dual POV in the first place. Anyway, CoHo has written something very insightful about why she wrote Losing Hope on her blog, which you can find here.
Now onto our review...
In a nutshell, Losing Hope is more than just a retelling of Hopeless. Yes, we know what happened already so why should we bother reading the same story again? Well, as I mentioned above there is more to it than just retelling the same story in Hopeless. We get to see/read about two new characters, Les and Daniel. Les is not really new but we get to know her a little better here. We also get to know the enigma that is Dean Holder.
It's been a long time since I've read Hopeless and I have actually forgotten how swoony Holder can be. I swear, if you loved him in Hopeless, you will fall in love with him more in this book, if that's even possible. And you get to see his tortured and wounded side, which was just totally heartbreaking.
In this book, we also get to explore or at least, we get a clearer picture of the relationship between Les and Holder. Gah! Those journal entries had me bawling like a baby. And the fact that Holder poured out his feelings to his sister through that journal was just heartbreaking. And although we pretty much knew what happened to Les, as it was already revealed in Hopeless, reading it again from Holder's POV was just gut-wrenching.
Plus of course, we really get to see how Holder felt about Sky from the moment he saw her and his developing feelings towards her. Swoon! I mean really, I'm 34 years old but their story still gets to me.
I just love the way CoHo writes her books. There's an honesty and openness, coupled with her effortless prose that makes reading her books easy. Easy in a sense that the story just flows wonderfully, from the highs to the lows, through the conflicts and resolutions without the reader ever feeling duped or short-changed. There are no purple prose here, folks. It's just concise and straightforward writing. Nothing more. And it works every time. It's definitely worth reliving Holder and Sky's story all over again.
ARC provided by Atria through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.