Jabberwocky Reviews

2: In Love and Diplomacy by BritishGravity

@BritishGravity, In Love and Diplomacy

"[2x Featured Story]

Ambition. Grit. Drive.

Twenty-four year-old Avery Woodsen has clawed her way up the political ladder and is finally one step closer to her dream. One step closer to DC. Her time at the Attorney General's office has come to an end, and she is prepared to move up another rung. She has sacrificed everything for this.

But when the newly retired ex-Attorney General seems to be targeted, Avery finds herself in the crosshairs. Will the security team sent from Greystone Security be enough? Will the trained, handsome man forced to be her protective shadow be able to keep her away from danger? Or will her desire to move up in her career have too strong of a pull? Or is what's tugging her not her career at all, but Reed Sterling?

He's trained. Precise. Powerful. He's on the fast track to becoming well known in the private security business... until an ambitious, beautiful woman and her dog need protection. Suddenly, Reed Sterling isn't so prepared anymore.

Trust no one. Except him.

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Coming from the last book I reviewed, I felt a bit of whiplash jumping to this one, and my review will be a bit shorter (after all, it is a shorter book) and focus on different things. This is also because the book isn't currently complete; I read up to chapter 30, but since the book is in a different stage of completion I'm not going to waste too much time commenting on the entire plot, and will focus more on the opening chapters.

Looking at the blurb, we have a strong protagonist with a relatable character arc—climbing up the career ladder—who gets thrust into this wider political conflict in DC. Naturally, this story wouldn't be complete without a prospective love interest. So I'm assuming we're going to have some sort of enemies-to-lovers arc, maybe a conflict between career and personal relationships, and it does turn out we get some of that. One thing that threw me off about this blurb is that we get a second paragraph from Sterling's perspective, which would imply we have a dual POV book, yet there's only one chapter from his perspective. I don't think you need this second paragraph. And I'd go as far as to claim that for consistency, you should remove the chapter from Sterling's perspective.

I find it interesting how you added all the songs in-line to the chapters, but at times I struggled to figure out the motivations behind some. I'm sure there's a method to the madness, and they're tangential to the text itself, but this was a bold choice.

So with these initial impressions of the plot in mind, moving past what we're told in the blurb, I would say that the main change of setting not hinted at previously is when Avery and Sterling spend a few chapters at a safehouse with Avery's dog. This happens roughly halfway through what I've read of the novel, and marks a shift from the main conflict and mystery—who's trying to kill Avery, and what's the truth of the matter?—to the interpersonal interactions between Avery and Sterling. I will admit I found this part of the book relatively uninteresting, and would go as far as to claim that the budding romantic arc between the two feels like it was taken from a different novel and sandwiched in the middle of the rest of the plot. In a similar sense, we begun with a lot of description in the opening chapters leading into the inciting incident, which isn't a bad thing objectively, but doesn't sit quite right for a thriller written with a generally fast pace. You can get away with this sort of start more when you're writing 40 chapters with long paragraphs in a meandering, literary setting like the first book I reviewed.