Sunday, June 3, 2012

Review + Book Feature : Want by Stephanie Lawton




(Click image to go to the Goodreads Page)
Title: Want
Author: Stephanie Lawton
Publisher: Inkspell Publishing
Genre: Young Adult, Romance, Contemporary
Format: eBook
Buy: Amazon | Inkspell Publishing


Julianne counts the days until she can pack her bags and leave her old-money, tradition-bound Southern town where appearance is everything and secrecy is a way of life. A piano virtuoso, she dreams of attending a prestigious music school in Boston. Failure is not an option, so she enlists the help of New England Conservatory graduate Isaac Laroche.

Julianne can’t understand why Isaac suddenly gave up Boston’s music scene to return to the South. He doesn’t know her life depends on escaping it before she inherits her mother’s madness. Isaac knows he must resist his attraction to a student ten years his junior, but loneliness and jealousy threaten his resolve.

Their indiscretion at a Mardi Gras ball—the pinnacle event for Mobile’s elite—forces their present wants and needs to collide with sins of the past. 

Will Julianne accept the help she’s offered and get everything she ever wanted, or will she self-destruct and take Isaac down with her?




Want is an unexpected turn into my usual reads. The cover itself is a representation of mixed genres like contemporary, romance, fiction, young adult, and even a small flare of paranormal.

The story itself was dark on a psychological sense. It involves self-inflicted pain, trauma, domestic abuse and the usual heartache. It was also dark in an angsty sense. Romance here was preserved as both bad and good, bad in terms of damaging ones reputation and good in terms of finding the ‘one’.

All the characters are easily distinguished from the other. Juli is our protagonist and she is a brilliant pianist. She’s training her way into this prestigious music school in Boston but her piano teacher, who is old and gray had a stroke and is hospitalized. His replacement is his famous nephew, Isaac. Juli scares me sometimes. Her reactions to everything are unpredictable. She could be throwing things around in this page and shouting in the other. Her self-esteem problem and her constant doubts she has of herself is overwhelmingly annoying, to the point, where I almost stopped reading the book and left it at that. But no, Stephanie Lawton, has written a page-turner. No matter what, you just can’t stop turning those pages.

The only thing I can say about Isaac is that I used to love him but now, I just don’t know what to say about him. The mysterious bad-boy disappointed me and I didn’t see it coming at all.

My favorite character of the book would be Dave. Dave is Isaac’s best friend from Boston and Juli’s newfound best friend. Dave was adorable, sweet and the only good guy in the whole story, the guy who challenged the bad things in Juli’s life with his sweetness and balanced good and evil.

Overall, Want is the type of book that keeps you guessing. The type that makes you believes it’s predictable but its not. It may be from the Young Adult genre, but I’m pretty sure fiction-junkie’s will like this as much as I have. This is a wonderful Debut from a wonderful new author, Stephanie Lawton. I hope there’s a sequel to this. The ending didn’t seem like the end at all.


About the lovely author:

Stephanie Lawton

After collecting a couple English degrees in the Midwest, Stephanie Lawton suddenly awoke in the deepest reaches of the Deep South. Culture shock inspired her to write about Mobile, Alabama, her adopted city, and all the ways Southern culture, history and attitudes seduce the unsuspecting.

A lover of all things gothic, she can often be spotted photographing old cemeteries, historic buildings and, ironically, the beautiful beaches of the Gulf Coast. She also has a tendency to psychoanalyze people, which comes in handy when creating character profiles.

On her thirtieth birthday, she mourned (okay bawled) the fact that in no way could she still be considered a “young adult,” so she rebelled by picking up Twilight and promptly fell in love with Young Adult literature.

She has a love/hate relationship with Mardi Gras –where does all that money come from?–and can sneeze 18 times in a row.

Find Stephanie here:
Blog: http://stephanielawton.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stephanie-Lawton-author/192796874113180
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/Steph_Lawton
Pre-order Want: http://www.inkspellpublishing.com/4/post/2012/02/want-by-stephanie-lawton.html
Photobucket

2 comments:

  1. Want sounds amazing .. I heard about it a few weeks ago and I've been wanting to read it ever since !! Thanks for the great review.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great review! Been itching for this one...

    ReplyDelete

Thank you so much for taking the time to comment! I love comments they're what keeps me going with this blog.