Take My Breath Away by Christie Ridgway (Cabin Fever #1)
Released: May 27, 2014
Contemporary Romance
Harlequin

Reviewed by May

Single mom Poppy Walker is busy renovating her family’s abandoned cabins high in the Southern California hills hoping to turn what was once her dad’s dream into a profitable resort for the wealthy. She’s not open for business yet – but that doesn’t stop Ryan Hamilton from trying to rent one of the cabins! Ryan is a movie star turned executive and can’t believe his good fortune to find someplace so remote – and a hostess who doesn’t recognize him!

What hurt the most about this book was how much it got wrong. We had a great set-up with a smart, entrepreneurial, and motivated mom and the tortured and sad rich pretty boy. There were family members, a great setting with the cabins, and a lot of space to grow, nurture, and watch a romance blossom.

Instead the author makes some baffling choices and essentially shoves them into an insta-love situation, ditches the whole “renovating cabins” location, and just for good measure force feeds us a secondary romance at random.

She was nuts if she thought Ryan could handle any of that. It worried him, it really did, that she walked around with all that emotion pinned to her sleeve. She’d get over these misbegotten feelings for him – likely brought on by a hailstorm and single-mother celibacy- but she was bound to get really hurt someday, so he was left to fret about the next man who’d come along, play with her heart a little and then pass out of her life.

Our leading man Ryan is a punk. I’m sorry – he’s just really stunted emotionally and due to the situation the author puts him in we don’t get to see him grow, heal, and move forward with his life. We see him shoved into an insta-fix that I couldn’t believe.

As for the heroine I had a really tough time that the huge single mom chip on her shoulder just fell off so quickly. She has a lot of trust and asking for help issues – to the point that she came across weak to me. I also felt that her son was used as a plot prop, and was not at all well written.

Bottom line? There was a lot of potential in this one, truly, but I can’t do a single mom and tortured Hollywood heartthrob fall in insta-love storyline like this one. It had a lot of heart, and could have had such depth and true emotion if only different choices had been made by the author. If you want this trope perhaps this story will work much better for you. The author most certainly is talented and wrote a story that pulled me right in – even if I didn’t enjoy where she took it.

Grade: C-

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