ARC #REVIEW: Straight From the Heart

ARC Review: Straight from the Heart by Breigh Forstner

Title: Straight from the Heart

Author: Breigh Forstner

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Publish Date: July 13, 2014

***This book may be inappropriate for younger audiences

Straight from the Heart by Breigh Forstner was an ARC I received via .pdf by Bewitching Book Tours for reading/viewing purposes only. In receiving this ARC, I will post an honest, true review reflecting my opinion over this book. This review is my opinion and hasn’t been influenced by any other party.

Summary: 
This is a story about a girl discovering and experiencing life for the first time. 

Bryn Schaefler grew up rich. Her parents expected the best out of her, picked her boyfriend for her, and groomed her to be the next trophy wife fresh out of High School. 

But when they discover she wants to pursue music instead of following in her mothers footsteps, they wanted to hear nothing about it. 

That was when Bryn left for good. 

By chance, she auditioned for main stream rock band Everlasting. Never in a million years did she think she would make it. 

Cale Pelton knew it was his fault for the band scrambling around to find a new guitarist. Once he saw Bryn audition, he knew he had to have her. Not just in the band, but in his mind, body and soul. 

This is the first book in the Straight from the Heart series. Follow Cale and Bryn as she goes on her first tour, and discovers there's so much more to her than she ever realized.

Cover: The people on the cover look way older than those in the novel. Bryn and Cole are teenagers, well Bryn is 18 while Cole is in his twenties. But the people on the cover look at least thirty. Other than that, I like the cover.

Characters:

I did not like Bryn at all. She was an idiot throughout the novel. She went for boys she shouldn’t have, she forgave Ethan even when she shouldn’t have, she got mad for no reason. I didn’t like her. Also, she magically got everything. Things would magically set themselves up for her. I hate characters like that. She left her parents and went to the restaurant, Louisa from Lozanos magically had a loft for Bryn to stay in, Louisa just happened to mention a band audition that happened that day. It just made me mad that Bryn didn’t have to work for anything. Everything was handed down to her on a silver platter. She was a Perfect Polly. I despise her character.

The boys of Everlasting, Cale, Luke, Vince and Raptor, were fine. They weren’t really memorable though. Cale was kind of funny sometimes. I always got Vince and Raptor mixed up. And Luke was just there sometimes. I didn’t really develop feelings for any of them. They were kind of boring.

I liked Lucy a lot. She was probably my favorite character. She was funny, and I liked her outfits. But I didn’t really get to know a lot about her personality. Damon was funny too. He was always with a lady. I can’t believe Bryn liked him though. He’s a womanizer.

Brayden was confusing as crap. At first, I didn’t really understand his role in the story. Then, at the end, I was like what is going on. He came out of nowhere and BAM! I was so confused.

All of the characters were sort of just there. They didn’t really have personalities or defining characteristics.

Plot:

The plot didn’t make sense at some points. Bryn would be doing something, and then she’d be doing something totally different. I had to go back at multiple times to re-read a section, and it didn’t mention her moving onto the new activity at all. It bounced around a lot.

Also, as I mentioned in Bryn’s character section, things would magically work out for her. It wasn’t really believable since events would just set up magically. Things don’t happen like that in real life. I’d understand if this was a categorized as a fantasy novel, but it’s contemporary romance which in my understanding is based on real life.

Ending:

The ending sucked. I hated how it ended. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I wanted to know what happened. Did he die? Did he live? I wanted to know what happened. Like why must authors end on such a suspenseful moment? I hate it when they do that.

Also, the ending was confusing. I don’t know where the shooting idea came from. It’s like the author wanted to add something that wasn’t relevant to the story at all to add drama. I feel as if the ending didn’t fit the story at all. It was just a scene to add drama.  

Overall:

I didn’t really like this book. When I started it, I read about twenty pages of it, and I debated whether or not to finish it of just mark it as a DNF. I decided to finish it till the end, and I probably could’ve gone without reading it. I didn’t have a favorite part. That was kind of shocking because I normally always have a favorite part, but I didn’t. Also, I didn’t feel anything while reading this book. It didn’t make me sad, happy, or anxious. I didn’t really care what happened.

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