Review: A Kindled Winter by Rachel L Demeter

A Kindled Winter by Rachel L Demeter
Purchase link: Amazon

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"Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas." - Dale Evans

A week before Christmas, Jeseca Reed sets off for Blue River, Oregon - her childhood home and a vault of tender memories. However, fate takes an unexpected turn when she's left stranded in the mountains' vast, untamed wilderness. Desperate and alone, she seeks shelter at a cottage and finds herself in the arms of a mysterious stranger.

Dr. David Drake was once a renowned cardiovascular surgeon. But a devastating tragedy has left him scarred both inside and out, unable to use his hands to operate again. For the past five years, his Blue River cottage has been his sole escape - a safe haven where he can shut out the world, bury himself in his grief, and reunite with his son's memory.

Together they are summer and winter. Fire and ice. And yet a poignant connection forms between them. Jeseca awakens David and thaws his heart with a romance hot enough to melt snow. But before David and Jeseca can fully embrace each other, they must wade through darkness and confront the ghosts of their pasts ...
              
Equal parts steamy and heartfelt, A Kindled Winter brings the spirit of the holidays to life with a passionate story of second chances and healing love.

DISCLAIMER: suitable for adults.

Rachel Demeter writes a sad and poignant Christmas tale with A Kindled Winter.

This is my first Christmas story for the season and I'm sorry to say this story frustrated and depressed me.

Let me start with the frustrated. In the version of the book I got, the medical statistics of Jeseca while she was sleeping were incorrect. In fact, not only were they incorrect, if she really had those readings, she'd be dead. That completely threw me out of the story. I'm not a medical person myself and my medical knowledge is rudimentary at best, but even I knew those basic stats were wrong. I did verify the stats to ascertain I wasn't overreacting prior to writing my review. I was not. I hope those stats get fixed and a corrected version gets uploaded.

The other thing was the sex. Foreplay, foreplay, foreplay ... pages and pages and pages of foreplay ... then ... nothing. No boom! All that foreplay and the sex was so cursory it was dissatisfying. I have to say, I was somewhat disappointed by it.

Then there's the depressing part of it. David and Jeseca both have rather tragic pasts. I understand tragedy and how it is sad, not happy. However, this is a Christmas story and I felt I was spending most of my time wading through their tragedy and despair, and there was not enough hope. Ms Demeter did a good job conveying how incredibly alone and despondent both David and Jeseca were based on their individual past tragedies but it was too slow a process to them feeling hope and finding happiness.

It was not easy connecting with David and Jeseca. Usually, I have something to say about each of the protagonists' characters but nothing about David and Jeseca jump out at me aside from their tragic pasts and their despair. There wasn't a deeper personality for me to discover since they both had such an air of despondency to them which overtook everything. Despite knowing their back story, there was very little character development.

As to the writing, Ms Demeter has an overwhelming fondness for the worded "glided". Both David and Jeseca glided a lot. I found the prose to be bordering on purple in some instances and just overly verbose in others. David and Jeseca needed to have more dialogue in order to connect with each other and to connect with the reader, instead there was too much excessively descriptive prose going on.

I'm kinda sorry this story didn't work for me. I had high hopes with it being my first Christmas story. I'm off to find another one to warm my heart.

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About the author

Rachel L. Demeter lives in the beautiful hills of Anaheim, California with Teddy, her goofy lowland sheepdog, and her high school sweetheart of eleven years. She enjoys writing poignant romances that challenge the reader's emotions and explore the redeeming power of love.

Imagining dynamic worlds and characters has been Rachel's passion for longer than she can remember. Before learning how to read or write, she would dictate stories while her mother would record them for her. She holds a special affinity for the tortured hero and unconventional romances. Whether crafting the protagonist or antagonist, she ensures every character is given a soul.

Her dream is to move readers and leave an emotional impact through her words.

Author Links:  Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads


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