Sunny Shelly’s Review: Hometown Heartless, by Carrie Aarons

HOMETOWN HEARTLESS by Carrie Aarons
Release Date: January 23

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Blurb:
One year ago, the boy next door was captured as a prisoner of war.

The boy whose window faces mine.
The backyard buddy who bandaged up my skinned knees.
The childhood crush that kept me up at night, wondering if he’d ever be my boyfriend.
The town hero I wrote endless letters to after he shipped out.
The green-eyed charmer who promised me a kiss the day I turned eighteen.

And now, he’s home.
But he didn’t come back as the boy I once knew.
He’s a man now, one with demons I can’t comprehend.
The damaged soldier keeps telling me I’m not his anymore.
That the war took him, turned him into someone unrecognizable.
What he hasn’t considered is that it took me, too.

He swears there is nothing left between us, that his heart died overseas. But with each look through our windows, we both know his lies are just that. With each fated meeting, the truth only becomes more evident.

Everett Brock occupies the shadows now.
And as much as I try to pull him into the light, it seems the switch is permanent.
What he doesn’t realize is that I’m willing to follow him into the darkness.

Sunny Shelly’s Review: 5 Stars

Whoa. This book was all kinds of emotional. There is something so pure and sweet about Everett and Kennedy’s love — despite the emotional and mental damage that he now has as a result of being a prisoner of war who’d been presumed dead. And despite how broken and battered emotionally and mentally he is, there is still that same bond between them that existed from the time they were little kids.

The push and pull between Everett and Kennedy is fantastic. It is gripping and completely captivated me. I loved that Kennedy knew when to walk away and when to speak her mind and didn’t allow herself to be a doormat with how hot and cold Everett ran.

I wouldn’t say that Everett’s descriptions of the torture he’d gone through as a POW were overly graphic. In fact, it’s rather tame by comparison if you’ve read Heartbreak Warfare by Heather Orgeron and Kate Stewart. Those scenes were hard to stomach. Hometown Heartless is all set after Everett’s returned home from being presumed dead, so we see the aftermath of how it affected him, and not the gruesome torture itself. Still, what he’d been through has a major impact on his life, Kennedy’s life, and we even see how his parents were affected.

The past few books put out by Carrie Aarons were all on the lighter side compared to Hometown Heartless. Still excellent, don’t get me wrong. But this story is quite a bit darker. Still has the same fantastic storytelling and awesome HEA that I’ve come to expect from this author, but it’s a bit of a darker, more emotional ride to get there.

I received an advanced copy and voluntarily left a review.

About the Author:
Author of romance novels such as The Tenth Girl and Privileged, Carrie Aarons writes books that are just as swoon-worthy as they are sarcastic. A former journalist, she prefers the love stories of her imagination, and the athleisure dress code, much better.

When she isn’t writing, Carrie is busy binging reality TV, having a love/hate relationship with cardio, and trying not to burn dinner. She’s a Jersey girl living in Texas with her husband, daughter and furry son.