The Arrangement 10 (Arrangement series) by H.M. Ward ☆☆☆☆
And it has arrived! I'd been waiting on this one. Sadly, my wait was in vain as this was pretty disappointing. Not disappointing in that I'd give it 3 stars though. In fact, I apparently had given in 5 stars on Goodreads until I started writing this review and then went back and changed it to 4 stars.
1. For an erotica series, nothing really happened in this segment. Sure, there was a lot of sexual tension, but that was it. Tension. She keeps denying what she wants and making excuses while he...is doing his own thing.
2. This is where the segment should have dropped to 3 stars or even maybe less... This series has been built entirely on the sexual tension and the drama. I've already said it was lacking in the first. These segments have always ended with major cliffhangers that leave you dying to read more. The reason is the amount of drama. Just when something starts to tie up, everything goes to hell and Avery is thrown into more shit than she knows what to do with. This has been a given. And plenty of things were on the table for this segment to start that I was looking forward to it. But it all wrapped up way too easily, tied in a pretty bow. Amber just gives in? The videos are just handled? Everything goes beautifully? And Black doesn't even appear...yet. The drama was gone.
3. The characters were already changing way too much in the last one, slipping from their originally set up characters. In this one, it's even more so. Not only is Avery still changing, but Sean seems like a completely different character, and not in the cathartic moment sense of the phrase. He just is someone else entirely. This of course leads to the inevitable cliff hanger ending, which wasn't really a cliffhanger. The book says tune in to see what Sean says next, but it's beyond obvious. I'm not as excited to read the next, but I will because I'm emotionally invested in figuring out where this is going to go.
Although these reasons seem like more than enough to drop it more than one star, I didn't because it did have several really good scenes. And where a lot of things pulled me away from the story, there were still a lot of things I highlighted because I loved. And in the end, when I was complaining to my best friend that nothing happened, she kept reminding me, "There's still tension. You've said that. And that's what you really read it for. Not the erotica and not the drama. You read it for the sexual tension." And I guess she knows me well enough that I had to agree :)
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