Black Box

by Cassia Leo

[Leah]

For those who regularly read the site you’ll know by now that I love the New Adult genre, and I adore the fact that it has brought me some fantastic new authors to enjoy and read! Cassia Leo is an author who I know is very popular on the NA scene, and so when I spotted her Shattered Hearts trilogy on Netgalley, I downloaded all three immediately, although I have yet to read them so when I was offered the chance to take part in Cassia’s blog tour for the UK publication of her new book Black Box, I was very excited. It sounded like a fantastic novel and I liked the idea of fate being a major player in the book, I quite like the idea of fate, although I’m not always so sure I believe in it and I was very excited to see how Mikki and Crush’s paths had intertwined so many times.

Black Box is a novel that I mostly loved. It was beautiful, filled with many, many quotable quotes, if I was the type to deface my book with a highlighter, and stop reading to make note of them all, but I’m not, so you’ll have to trust me on this. It’s a dark novel, dealing with bi-polar disorders, feelings of suicide, rape, think of any bad thing a person can go through and Mikki and Crush have gone through it, and although the novel is tough to read because of its subject matter, it’s also kinda hopeful because Mikki and Crush find each other, and that was awesome. I love to read about two messed up people, who have inadvertently saved each other over the years. It just makes me ridiculously happy for some reason, mostly because I like the fate thing – I liked that Mikki and Crush didn’t just meet at the airport, the day they were both supposed to fly to LA, it went back further than that and I liked how it was unravelled.

On the other hand, the novel is wildly unrealistic. WILDLY. It’s inferred to us that Crush killed two people (one can be explained and was explained) but the other was cold-blooded (whatever the circumstances were – Crush killed a person, and the city of Boston WASN’T BOTHERED ENOUGH TO INVESTIGAGE? Unlikely. I don’t care the reasons behind Crush doing what he did – heroic, absolutely, but murder is murder and it almost seemed unreal when it was relayed back to us because there was so little reaction to the fact he killed a man. I also wished for more from the whole “Black Box” deal. It was an interesting concept, and I enjoyed the Black Box tale, but I wanted more from the actual black box, I sort of felt like it was rushed and the whole thing was just over with before the novel was half done, which was disappointing. It was this big, mysterious, awesome thing that had helped both Mikki and Crush at various points in their life and then it was just over. :(

If you dig too deep you could probably find a lot wrong with Black Box, but I took it for what it was and I rather let all the nonsensical, too-good-to-be-true stuff slide because it made for a better story. So what if there were no repercussions for what Crush did, or that there were too many instances of fate, when there was an awesome love story unfurling between two characters who deserved nothing better than to find each other?! I read books for enjoyment, not to tear them apart and it’s the work of a great writer when things that might usually bother me, don’t. I’ve learnt to just go with the flow when I’m reading and I just loved Mikki and Crush’s story. It’s not all butterflies and flowers and pie-in-the-sky happiness, but I liked that meeting Crush forced Mikki to perhaps re-think what she wanted with her life, to live, and that was beautiful. I loved Black Box, sure it wasn’t perfect, but I loved getting to know Mikki and Crush and barely put the book down once I’d started it!