About Books #51: Come For Me Darling

At one point, the male MC states: “It was strange and wonderful to have such extreme thoughts”. Honestly? That might just be the best way to summarize Come For Me Darling.

I was offered an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for a review. All opinions expressed are strictly my own.

The story

I take people’s dreams and turn them into reality. As the most famous home renovator on television, I take broken piles of bricks and beams and turn them into forever homes.

That’s why it sucks so hard to see my dream and know that I can’t make it mine.

But now London Anderson, the girl I fell in love with and who has haunted me since high school, has just inherited her grandmother’s falling-down house. And no one’s better with broken dreams than me.

I swear it’s fate finally throwing us back together and I’m not going to waste this chance. I’m putting it all out there. I’ll get down and dirty, use all the tools I have, whatever it takes to convince her that our first love can be our forever love.

The opinion

I need to put a quick disclaimer here: I don’t usually like books narrated in the first person. I don’t really know why – maybe it’s just that I’m used to a third person narrator? Maybe it’s the fact that a first person narrator calls for me to identify with the “I” person too much? Either way, I felt like this book especially, with its switching POV could probably have done with a third person narrator.

Sure, you can ask your readers to identify strongly with one character. But to then constantly change the character they need to identify with? Because there’s two of them that you keep switching off? I feel like that could probably have been done better using “he/she” rather than “I”.

But again – that’s 100% personal.

Less personal, is the feeling that it might be useful to read the books the Kaine brothers previously appeared in. While reading this book, I often got the impression that I was missing some information. The three brothers, including the male main character in this one, Ben, feature as minor characters in some of the author’s other series. While this series can be read separately – or so it is stated – I did at times feel that the story was a bit disjointed. Quite possibly, that was exactly because I hadn’t read the other series, and as such couldn’t quite connect some of the secondary characters in Come For Me Darling.

On a more positive note, the story as a whole was actually really enjoyable. Naturally, this isn’t going to be “perspective-changing” or “world shaking”, but there is a nice romance, interesting secondary characters, … And of course, one plot point which (very smartly, I might add!) had its resolution postponed to the next book in this series. I definitely would like to know more about the grandma’s and their believe that a prophecy was somehow linked to the lightning that almost stuck all of the main characters, but I guess – again – that’ll probably be something for the next book.

Finally – while I will read “insta-love”, I’m not usually the biggest fan of it. The fact that these two main characters knew each other 20 years before made for a pleasant “cover-up” for that!

The rating: 2.75

Come For Me Darling was an enjoyable read, that definitely means to get you hooked for the next book in this series. There’s quite a lot going on throughout the book, and as a reader, I was really pulled into both the story and its locations – the true (subtle) star of this book might have been the island itself, but you would probably have to read the book to fully get that 😉 There’s some not-quite-insta-love and quite a few “I shall be with you forever”, but then: that’s what you’re always going to get in a story like this.

If you feel like you might want to give this one a read, you can find it on Goodreads!

-Saar