Review: "Healing Hearts" by Taryn Kincaid

Healing Hearts by Taryn Kincaid

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


2 1/2 stars (rounded down to 2 stars because I was disappointed to see a good premise "wasted" like this)



This book has most of the key ingredients to a good romance: an emotionally and physically damaged hero who can't forget the horrors of war + a tortured heroine who blames the hero for her brother's death on the battlefield and is in dire straits due to her father's gambling debts + angsty conflicts heightened by the hero's sense of guilt and inadequacy + steamy love scenes. Unfortunately, all that is crammed into the word limit of a short story - and the overall result is a very rushed romance that failed to grab me.

I wish this had been a full-length book, because I liked Ms. Kincaid's writing and I think I would have enjoyed it better if I didn't feel like I had to run to keep up with Adam and Emma's more than fast "courtship". As it was, it was hard to connect with their emotions because whenever I started to feel an empathy for them, they changed and I was bereft. Adam and Emma spent a lot of time thinking to themselves and not so much talking to each other. Their inner dialogues gave me a good insight into their feelings so I could (sort of) see why one would fall in love with the other, but I couldn't understand how that happened considering their lack of verbal interaction and their inability to read minds. At the end of the day, and I mean that literally because the whole story happens in the span of a few hours, it was hard to buy their HEA.

All in all, I can't say I liked this book. I didn't hate it either, and that's the best thing I can say about it.

Note: I received this eARC from Carina Press via NetGalley. That had no influence on my review/rating.



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