Trying It All

by Christi Barth

[chymerra]

As I have stated in my other posts, I really hate picking a book up and realizing it is the 2nd to the last book in a series. There is so much backstory that I feel that I am missing out of and the other characters, who usually are in the book and I am left thinking to myself “What happened to them” and “What is their story”. Drives me nuts and yes, I know that it is all on me. I could just as easily skipped over these books when I was selecting them from NetGalley. But, no, I like to drive myself nuts and continue to request them.

I thought that Trying It All was a pretty interesting book. I loved Riley and Summer’s backstory. When Riley was a teenager, he was involved in a near tragic accident in the mountains of Italy that left him and his friends stranded for 3 days. Summer was the survivor of a mass shooting at her college. What made it interesting to me is that the author explored how to similar traumatic experiences could affect people differently.

With Riley, it made him hypervigilant to scenarios where something could go wrong. He was an expert with what to do in every sort of situation. He even took a job that used his talents (for lack of a better word). He was very detail orientated and never, ever did he take a leap without seeing where the leap would take him and if it was safe. He was so uptight that it hurt reading about it in the book. Which is why Summer didn’t like him. Her nickname for him was FunSucking DeathStar. I started dying laughing when I read that because it was so true.

Summer, however, decided that she had to live life like there would be no tomorrow after she left the hospital. So she did everything to the extreme and refused to let herself have a lasting, loving relationship with anyone. She even mentioned that the word long-term gave her a twitch. All because she might die the next day. I would say that she went the extreme opposite direction that Riley did.

Now, I don’t know how they interacted in the first 3 books, which peeved me because there was a lot of dislike of each other, but I will say that their mutual dislike was very short-lived in this book. Like a couple of chapters short-lived. Then they kissed and everything got turned upside down.

I liked how Summer was able to bring Riley out of his comfort zone on certain things….like paragliding. I do have to say that the kiss they shared while doing that was very, very hot but very unsafe. Good thing that Summer was able to see that and stop it before something happened. But Riley couldn’t make Summer see that sometimes playing it safe was a good thing until a very bad thing happened to her.

The sex scenes were off the pages hot and I liked that the author had them do the dirty in unconventional areas. They had sex on a beach (of course, while I was reading it all I could think of was…ouch sand….lol), in a car parked on the street and in a store on a rug in front of a sofa after hours. Normally reading about people having sex in public places doesn’t do it for me but this time it did.

I will say that I did agree with Riley when he did what he did and I agreed with Chloe when she called Summer out. Honestly, I think it should have been done earlier but hey, the rest of the book would have been boring. I also agreed with the intervention that Riley’s friends did. I think he needed it and again, something that probably should have been done earlier in the book.

The end of the book was typical with an HEA. I am waiting to see if Josh gets his own book. Not that should be interesting to read :).

How many stars will I give Trying It All: 4

Why: I thought that this was a good book with some hot sex scenes. I also liked that not so opposites attract angle of the book. It made for a very interesting read.

Will I reread: Yes

Will I recommend to family and friends: Yes

Age range: Adult

Why: Sex and language

**I chose to leave this review after reading an advance reader copy**