I'm always wary of "love triangle" books. More often than not, I end up sympathizing with the "wrong person" in the triangle and end up disappointed when the heroine ends up with the "other guy". This book wasn't a typical romance love triangle story, but I had the same experience - I wanted the heroine to end up with the wrong hero.
Broken by Megan Hart
(2007, Contemporary) 7/31/07
Grade: 3
Sadie lives vicariously through Joe and his sexual conquests. Every month she meets him for lunch, and imagines that she’s the one having uninhibited sex with a stranger. In real life, Sadie is struggling to hold things together, taking care of her quadriplegic husband and dealing with their changed relationship. Her fantasies with Joe are her only outlet.
Megan Hart is an excellent writer, but I find her books extremely frustrating. The endless sex scenes may be inventive, but I didn’t find them all that interesting, and in this book, I didn’t even think they added to the character development. They just seemed “titillating”. I was about to give up on the book, when I finally got to the scenes between Sadie and her husband Adam. These were a revelation - tender, honest, aching and even brutal - but real and touching, in a way the sex scenes were not. I ended up reading the book for the interludes between Sadie and Adam. Unfortunately, unlike Dirty, this book was not really about the relationship between Sadie and Adam. Adam is just an obstacle to be overcome. (I was especially annoyed that - spoiler alert - Adam’s death seemed to be the result of Sadie taking time for her own life and emotional needs.) I came away frustrated, because for me, the emotional heart of the book had nothing to do with Joe, but he was the focus of the “happy ending”.
I don't know what Megan Hart's intentions are. Maybe she likes writing sex scenes, and character development is only secondary for her. But I can't help thinking, when I read her books, that she's a victim of the "erotica craze". Her books would be so much better if she wasn't so focused on how many ways her characters can f***, and used some of the "sex scene page count" to explore other aspects of their lives. The scenes with Adam and Sadie were so good, they took my breath away. She was addressing a situation that I've rarely seen addressed in other books, and without the gauzy unreality that you find in most romances with disabled characters. If that part of the story had been in the forefront, I would have given this book a 5. But she kept shifting away, to more blah scenes of boinking. Why, why, why?
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