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Review: Eversea (#1, Eversea) by Natasha Boyd

My Thoughts

An instantly absorbing modern-day fairy tale that
completely swept me away, heart and soul.
I fell hard for this love story and its alluring characters. It encapsulated
that intangible magic I hope to find every time I begin a new book.

Related Posts: 2014 Favorites, Hollywood Romances

Synopsis

An orphaned, small-town, southern girl, held hostage by responsibility and self-doubt.

A Hollywood A-list mega-star, on the run from his latest scandal and with everything to lose.

A chance encounter that leads to an unlikely arrangement and epic love affair that will change them both forever.

When his co-star and real-life girlfriend is caught cheating on him with her new director, A-list hottie, Jack Eversea, finds himself in sleepy Butler Cove, South Carolina. Jack hopes the sultry southern heat in this tiny coastal Lowcountry town will hide him not only from the tabloids and his cheating girlfriend, but his increasingly vapid life and the people who run it. He doesn’t count on meeting Keri Ann Butler.

Keri Ann has relied on herself so long, dealing with her family’s death and the responsibilities of keeping up her family’s historic mansion, that boys and certainly the meager offering of eligible boys in Butler Cove, have never figured into her equation. But fate has other plans. Suddenly face to face with the man who played the movie role of her favorite fictional character, Jack has Keri Ann yearning for everything she has previously avoided … and Jack must decide whether this funny, sassy girl is worth changing his life for, before his mistakes catch up to him.

My Review

Loved. Loved. Loved. This. Book. It was everything I needed and more. I was hooked from the very first page. It’s the kind of story you quickly get lost in, forgetting time, space and real life as you immerse yourself in the lives of these fictional characters. I saw it reeling like a movie, unwinding scene by scene as the beautiful man… the super star, fell for the small-town girl who saw more to him than the rest of the world. The writing was entrancing and the story beautiful. Although we’ve seen similar stories before, there was simply something special and honest about how this author told the unlikely story of Jack Eversea and Kerri Ann Butler.

“I was like a piece of that sea glass lying forgotten in a jar upstairs. A discarded shard that had been washed and tumbled back and forth by the momentum of the sea, only to wash up in Butler cover and stay stuck and forgotten without any hope of becoming something more. Something more beautiful. I needed to find my potential.”

Keri Ann has seen too much tragedy by the age of twenty-two. She’s lost her parents, her grandmother and now she’s been shouldering the responsibility of fixing up a historical home that some are intent on taking away from her while pressing pause on her life as her brother attends medical school. With no boyfriend and next-to-nothing experience in both love and intimacy, she’s simply going through the motions without really living a life. She’s content, but she’s stagnant. So when a hooded boy who turns out to be one of the most sought-after actors around sits at the small-town diner where she works, her world begins to irrevocably shift and nothing would be the same from that point forward.

“He was like a bright and beautiful rogue planet. He pulled the entire galaxy into a gravitational wobble until he got close enough to suck you in and tilt your axis head over heels.”

Jack Eversea is escaping the vises of his stifling reality. Dealing with the infidelity of his girlfriend, he finds himself in Butler Cove, searching for some much needed peace and respite from the bright lights of fame. When he meets Keri Ann, he can’t help but be drawn to her. She’s kind and funny and has made it clear she is thoroughly unimpressed by him, although he suspects he does have an unsettling effect on her. Keri Ann, in the meanwhile, is trying to keep from liquefying into a puddle of desire. But the more she gets to know him, the more she sees how good and caring Jack is. They make an unlikely agreement to help each other out and they are thrust together, slowly getting to know each other, slowly falling for the other as the chemistry between them crackles.

“… he wasn’t just a boy. He was a dazzling, heart-stopping aura of a man who in just five days had me feeling like I was perched on the edge of a precipice and seriously contemplating throwing myself over the edge. The idea was terrifying in its finality and its inevitability.”

I loved them as individual characters. Keri Ann is a girl who is riddled by insecurities, her nose forever stuck betwixt the pages of a book as she lived her life in fiction, not with experiences. She couldn’t process how such a beautiful man like Jack – inside and out – would ever look at her beyond the bounds of an improbable friendship.

“It’s amazing… that you seem to have no idea how fucking beautiful you are.”

And Jack… he’s trying so hard to process who he is beyond the reach of the bright lights and the automated motions of living your life by a schedule and a carefully choreographed contract. Keri Ann treats him like a real person and he finds her wit, unpredictability and goodness irresistible. But can he ever truly escape the confinements of his life and be the person she deserves for him to be?

“And then suddenly, when you get away from it for just a moment, it’s like you are in this big drowning vacuum of nothingness. There’s no you. There’s no one telling you how to be you or what to do, it’s just you, except there’s no you anymore.”

They can’t resist the intensifying attraction between them for too long and soon, together they find a rightness they never expected. It’s beauty, happiness, desire and everything they’ve ever hoped for in each other’s arms. But just as things fall into place, everything suddenly falls apart as fate sends a cruel reminder of Jack’s unstable reality. Two hearts left broken in the wake of the turbulence.

“How could the perfect man come along and tell you he was feeling all the same feelings you were, but you couldn’t keep him?”

This story owned me. I was so consumed by it all, devouring every moment of happiness, every moment of heartbreak. It’s everything I love to experience in a book as it swept me away in a fairy-tale romance of two people who fell hard for each other, but whose reality refused to let them be. The story ends on a cliffhanger, but lucky for me I was able to immediately pick up Forever Jack and immerse myself once more in the impossible love story of Jack and Keri Ann.