Own the Wind (Chaos, #1)

by Kristen Ashley

[Cocktails and Books]

Having just finished The Gamble by Kristen Ashley, I figured I would pick up her latest book. A few days out from finishing the book, I'm still torn over how I feel about it.
Tabby and Shy had a rough start to their relationship and that was made apparent in the prologue to the story. Tabby, raised by a verbally abusive mother and a very caring father who just happened to be the head of the Chaos Motorcycle Club, was a bit of a wild child and it took some pretty harsh words from the one Chaos brother she had a crush on, Shy, to force some changes in Tabby. Those changes not only impacted Tabby, but also Shy. But when tragedy strikes, it's Shy that Tabby reaches out to and Shy who helps Tabby move her life forward and embrace the life she was meant to live.

I really liked the romance between Tabby and Shy. I'm a sucker for any romance that starts as a teenage crush and grows into something more. Especially when that teenage crush has to somehow make up for some wrong he's caused. This romance had that in spades. Shy and Tabby get over that little obstacle pretty quickly, but we find out there are many other emotional issues that need to be overcome with these two. They manage to do that, even though it was sometimes frustrating to have to listen to the somewhat archaic methodologies of Shy and Tabby just letting him role over her.

What took away from the story was the language of the characters...mainly the members of the Chaos brotherhood. And I'm not referring to swearing (because I'm down with all use of swear words). No, what I'm referring to is the use of poor sentence structure. Do members of a motorcycle "club" really speak this way? And, as Krist pointed out during a FB Page conversation, it seems the "g" falls off all words that usually require it to be there. Here's an example:

Shy approached and when he go close Tack asked, "She doin' okay?"
"Sleepin'," Shy answered.

"She's doin' okay," Tack muttered.
Now I've yelled at my kids for writing and speaking like this, so having to go through a couple hundred pages of this was something that became a huge pet peeve to me. It was distracting and really took away from the story for me.

While this was the first installment of the series, I felt like I was missing a huge piece of information when we got towards the big build up a the end of the story since there were a handful of characters that seemed to come from another book. I didn't know their backstory and we didn't get enough information to fill in the blanks. Luckily, they appear at a point in the story where I didn't really care who they were or what they were doing, I just wanted to know what was up with Shy.

I didn't hate the book, but it's not one of my favorite...despite some decent buzz from other reviewers.