Don't Hold Back (Love Hurts, #4)

by Missy Johnson

[Eve1972]

I like this cover. Good representation of the hero/heroine found within. Interesting typogrpahy and good composition.

OMG this book! I stayed up way past my bedtime (yes I have a bedtime. I am old) reading this thing. It grabbed me by the heart from page one and would not let me go until I read the last word. I had forgotten how much I love a good emotional read and this one had that is SPADES.

It was fantastically well written. This author has a very engaging way of writing. It was nicely paced. It was full of FEELS. It was full of heartbreak, but it was also filled with hope. The secondary characters though just blips on the radar for most of the book added another layer to the story. That of the people left behind. How do you continue living your life when you know one of the people who make up your whole world has an expiry date on theirs. How do you grieve when that person is still standing before you? My heart broke for all of them.



Erin and Cade both were fantastic characters for entirely different reasons. Erin was SO strong in the face of her impending death. She wanted to make everything easier for those she was leaving behind. Life gave this young lady a bushel of lemons, and she wanted to make the sweetest of lemonade with the time she had left. Cade was a harder character to like. Here you have a girl who has no choice her life is going to end before her 25th birthday. Then you have Cade who is basically throwing his life away through resentment and bad decisions. You will want to throat punch him on more than one occasion. I know I sure did. I wanted to yell "wake the fuck up" at him so many times. Thankfully a 24-year-old terminally ill young lady does that job for you. I fell in love with Cade, and my heart burst with pride to see who he became at the end. A big part of me wants to see Cade get an HEA in another book. He deserves it, and Erin would want that for him. These two people just know each other for a minuscule amount of time in the grand scheme of things (less than two months), but the impact that they have on each other's lives stretches well beyond.

Since I have pretty much written a novella-length review at this point, I am going to wrap it up with these thoughts. Many people are going to give this one a pass because of the subject matter, and that is a damn shame IMO. Life isn't always unicorns farting rainbows. Sometimes people come into our lives and leave just as fast but what they leave behind shapes the people we become. So this might not be your typical HEA romance it was still very much romance in my eyes and one worth reading. Two HUGE thumbs up from yours truly.