Easy by Tammara Webber - Book Review

Rescued by a stranger.
Haunted by a secret
Sometimes, love isn’t easy…

He watched her, but never knew her. Until thanks to a chance encounter, he became her savior…

The attraction between them was undeniable. Yet the past he’d worked so hard to overcome, and the future she’d put so much faith in, threatened to tear them apart.

Only together could they fight the pain and guilt, face the truth—and find the unexpected power of love.

A groundbreaking novel in the New Adult genre, Easy faces one girl's struggle to regain the trust she's lost, find the inner strength to fight back against an attacker, and accept the peace she finds in the arms of a secretive boy.

I started this expecting nothing short of gold, having over-indulged in reading reviews for it.  It seems like everyone and their mother can’t say enough about the amazingness of Easy, give it a glowing 5-star review, and rave about the positive message behind the scorching hot romance.  So when I picked it up and ended up with a really good read instead of a mind-blowingly amazing one, I kind of felt…disappointed.  Which sucks, because if I hadn’t built my expectations so high, if I’d gone into this read with a completely unbiased and fresh mind, I’d have been pleasantly surprised.

To see all the reasons Easy is a can’t-miss, all you have to do is google ‘Easy reviews’ and click on pretty any of the search results.  The reasons people loved Easy are all valid and true, so I won’t waste a lot of time getting into the positives.  I’ll just say that this novel does a great job with a very difficult subject matter, and Lucas is most definitely one of the hottest things to be put on paper in a while.

The things that took away from this read, for me, were its predictability, slight lack of romantic build-up, and a few things Jacqueline thought or did that just rang false to me, which I’ll get into in a minute.

Lucas is most assuredly the sex-god everyone makes him out to be.  My eyes were bulging and my heart was racing just reading about his smoldering good-looks.  But there wasn’t a whole lot of growth to his character throughout Easy.  He has a secret that gets revealed toward the end, and in the revealing we see how much growth he went through to get to the point he’s at now, but none of it actually occurs during the novel.  His romance with Jacqueline, while definitely sweet and sexy, wasn’t an all-encompassing thing that filled my belly with butterflies and left me breathless, and I attribute this to an almost instant attraction between them.  I wouldn’t call it insta-love; their love story feels very real.  But it just wasn’t…gripping.  I don’t know how else to describe it.

There were a few “reveals” in this book, most of which a blind person could have seen coming a mile away.  I’m not sure they were meant to be all that shocking, but still.  One of them at least rang just a bit too cliché to avoid a small eye-roll moment.

And finally, the biggest issue I had with Easy.  Anyone picking this book up knows it deals with rape as a subject matter.  Jacqueline gets attacked early on and saved by Lucas, but the memory of what almost happened, and the scum who almost did it, haunt her throughout the book.  For the most part, like I said, I adore how Webber handled it; it was strong and poignant and almost brought tears to my eyes a couple of times.  But there were just a few incidents when Jacqueline would be reliving a certain thing involving what happened, then look at Lucas and immediately get all hot and horny.  I’m sorry, but I don’t see myself or any other woman EVER being able to even THINK about getting turned on when your mind was so recently in such a dark place.  I’d give examples, but they’d be toeing the line of spoilers a bit too much for comfort.  You’ll know what I mean when you read it.  Maybe I’m being a little too hard on Easy for something so relatively small, but that’s what makes rape such a difficult subject matter to tackle; even small mistakes seem glaring in the face of such an emotional, powerful thing.

That said, Easy is still a very solid novel that really shouldn’t be missed; just do yourself a favor and don’t expect it to live up to its tremendous hype, because honestly, what book could?  Go into Easy with a fresh mind, and you’ll close the cover on a very satisfying read.

Easy - 4 out of 5 stars