REVIEW - LEAP OF FAITH by Jamie Blair:

TITLE: Leap of Faith

AUTHOR: Jamie Blair

AGE GROUP: Young Adult/New Adult
GENRE: Contemporary Romance
RELEASE DATE: September 3, 2014
PUBLISHED BY: Simon & Schuster
FORMAT: eBook and Paperback
PAGES: Approx. 241

MY GOODREADS REVIEW LINK

RATING: 2 Stars!

BOOK BLURB:

Can true love be built on lies? A teen on the run seeks relief and redemption in this gripping, romantic read. Leah Kurtz has finally found a place to call home, a town where she and baby Addy can live in peace, far from the drug-infested place she grew up. Chris is one of the best parts of her new life, the only person whose ever made her feel safe. And now that she's found him, there's no way she can tell the truth: Her real name is Faith, not Leah. She's seventeen, not nineteen. And the baby isn't hers, Faith kidnapped her. Faith's history catches up with her when a cop starts asking questions and Chris's aunt spots her picture in the newspaper. She knows it's time to run again, but if Faith leaves, she'll lose Chris. If Chris is in love with a lie, though, did Faith ever really have him in the first place?

2 “Really? That’s The Ending” Stars!

The Review: 

Let me start off by saying that this book was good, for the most part. I enjoyed the struggle of the heroine and the idea that she cared enough to change the fate of her sister. She was very naive and things seemed to fall way to easily into place at times, but I liked the story... up until the ending. THAT part? Really put me in a bad mood. Let me explain...

Warning, this review is very spoilery...

Characters/Story...

Faith is the younger sister of two, who live with their strung out, junkie mother who also prostitutes on the side. The mom has struck up a deal with the local drug pusher to get pregnant so he and his girlfriend can have a baby. All of this is surrounded by a whole boat load of fuckedupedness! I mean, from the moment the plot is laid out, I was in awe at everyone’s stupidity. Unless they had plans to sell the baby on the black market, WHY would any of them want to do this, besides Faith’s mom, who was going to get ten grand out of the deal for delivering a baby.

Whatever their reasons, which don’t get fleshed out in the story, Faith decides to give her mom a little payback by making her life as miserable as possible while she’s pregnant, so she flushes her pot and spend the next nine months force-feeding her prenatal vitamins and generally trying to improve her health for the sake of the baby.

But even in Faiths limited seventeen years, she knows that baby will grow up in the same hate infested environment she has, so when the baby’s born, she steals it and takes off for parts unknown.

Insert a lot of traveling, a lot of baby puking and a lot of learning how to be a proper mom, Faith, who now calls herself Leah, gets lucky and finds people who are willing to help her, give her a place to stay, a job to work at and a family to be a part of. But not all this is without difficulty, as she’s still a teen, raising an infant and keeping secrets no one can ever learn.

Also, she finds love. Chris enters her life and he’s got a tragic past of his own he’s keeping secrets about... which by the way, we never really get concrete answers to. You think there’s more to his sisters death than what we are told, but its never confirmed. I get the sense, his mother had something to do with it in her depressed state, but again, its not delved in to.

And the ending!!! THIS, left me beyond pissed. I wanted to know the ending. I wanted to know what happened to all these characters I’d grown to care about over the course of this story. But instead, I’m left with way too many questions. The ending? What ending. Its open-ended, as in, there is NO ENDING. None. At. All. Leah is in a hotel room, starving because everything has gone completely wrong, and she’s about to give up Addy, the baby, when she hears, or THINKS she hears a knock at the door. She peeks through the hotel peep hole and sees familiar eyes. 

But is she hallucinating, because now instead of first-person-Leah-POV, we get a paragraph of narrator POV where she opens the door and then... NOTHING. I thought I got an incomplete copy and was about to throw down with Amazon. But after checking Goodreads and seeing other people complain about the same thing, I realized it really was the end of the story and the editor and authors choice to leave us hanging like that. And personally, I think it was probably a bad one. 

Seriously, I hate these kinds of endings. I read so much that I don't want to ponder the ending, or write my own ending, or think on it for days and days afterwards because it had no ending. I want to be told what happens. I want a HEA, even if its not the HEA I want. Okay... rant over ;)

The Wrap Up: 

I liked the writing, I liked the story, I even liked the characters, even though I think Faith/Leah needed some major work, and yeah, most of my displeasure was about the ending, but this book also had other problems. Questions that weren’t answered, things left to the imagination and unrealistic circumstances. I’m just not a huge fan of open-ended stories.

Buy the Book!

  

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