Review: Dedicated by Neve Wilder
SYNOPSIS:
“Our greatest hit is a love song I wrote for my bandmate. And he has no idea.”
Messy-haired, soulful-eyed, off-kilter lyricist Les Graves holds tight to the hedonist’s credo of consumption in every avenue of life. He has trouble staying still, trouble staying sober, trouble turning down a good time—but put a pen in his hand, and he’ll set a page on fire.
Music was Evan Porter’s ticket out of the backwater mud puddle he was born in, the passion keeping him warm as he busked on street corners, fueling him through a dead-end bartending job. Every chord, every song, every ounce of sweat has been devoted to making Porter & Graves a success. He’s the level-head, the quiet maestro, the seatbelt that keeps Les from flying too far out of control. And he’s getting pretty tired of playing savior.
Their onstage chemistry is electric, offstage it’s… complicated.
After Porter & Graves’s third album bombs, the pressure is on for the duo to redeem themselves with their fourth. While sequestered in an East Tennessee cabin to compose, things take a turn for the worse when an event from their past comes back to haunt them in an embarrassingly public fashion and forces them into an unusual position that tests a partnership already hanging by its bloody roots.
Can Evan and Les find harmony or will they—and their music career—go down in flames?
REVIEW:
Mixed feelings as I finished this novel but overall I am happy with how it all ended. The first 40% of this book was painfully slow and dry. But once the storyline got going, I couldn’t put the book down. There was just something about the chemistry between Les and Evan that made it all the more sweeter once they gave in.
So the story is told in dual POVs with several flashback scenes. Basically there is an incident that occurred half a year ago, which has resulted in tension between Les and Evan (i.e. sizzling sexual tension that Evan is in complete denial over). Les is painted as the wreckless, man-whore over and over again but my heart ached for him because he is so much more. Evan was an interesting character, he tended to keep his feelings close to his heart and he was difficult to read.
When Les and Evan finally give into the brewing sexual chemistry between them, the results are explosive. It’s clear that with all the emotional history shared between these two, that this is just another layer of enrichment to their relationship. Except Les still has some bad habits and Evan needs to come to terms with some surprising deceit. I liked how these two communicated and worked through issues. I appreciated the honesty and transparency as Les battled his own inner demons. It brought a raw and real feel to the story.
The ending was everything I hoped it would and left me wanting more. I just wish we could have skipped the 100-some pages of background story to get there.
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