Mini Reviews: Wait for You + Trust in Me

WAIT FOR YOU
Wait for You #1
Jennifer Armentrout/J. Lynn
Contemporary New Adult
384 Pages
William Morrow Paperbacks
Available Now
Source: Finished copy from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Amazon)
Some things are worth waiting for . . .

Traveling thousands of miles from home to enter college is the only way nineteen-year-old Avery Morgansten can escape what happened at that fateful Halloween party five years ago—an event that forever changed her life. What she never planned on was capturing the attention of the one guy who could shatter the precarious future she's building for herself.

Some things are worth experiencing . . .

Cameron Hamilton is six feet, three inches of swoon-worthy hotness, com-plete with a pair of striking blue eyes and a remarkable ability to make Avery want things she believed had been irrevocably stolen from her. Getting involved with him is dangerous. Yet ignoring the simmering tension that sparks between them—and brings out a side of her she never knew existed—is impossible.

Some things shouldn't be kept quiet . . .

But when Avery starts receiving threatening e-mails and phone calls, she's forced to face a past she wants to keep buried and acknowledge that someone is refusing to allow her to let go of that night when everything changed. If the devastating truth comes out, will she resurface with one less scar? And will Cam be there to help her?

And some things are worth fighting for . . . 

MY THOUGHTS
Wait for You is pure pleasure; a read not unusual in its setup but sweetly sinful in its delivery, giving us a romance gloriously slow to develop and fraught with tension thanks to a number of weighty unspoken secrets. Avery is absolutely adorable in her wariness and her quiet reserve–markers of a painful past discerned through just enough hints to have us filling in the traumatizing blanks–her awkwardness with Cam throughout endearing her to us more and more with each chapter we’re in her head. She’s the first to admit she’s a runner when it comes to emotional challenges, and while this tendency is frustrating at times (something she freely admits to herself and us as readers), the brief flashes of life before she came to West Virginia are enough to have us tempted to stick our heads in the sand right alongside her, hoping the threat of emotional discovery simply goes away just as much as we wish for her to simply step up and face it.

Cam is a true highlight of this story, his initial introduction raising our eyebrows in question at his apparent overconfidence and abundance of self-love, but we quickly see that his self-congratulatory statements are all in jest, meant to goad Avery into responding to him even if that response is laughably insulting in nature. He's infinitely patient with Avery, there for her simply as a friend for much of the book before he oh-so carefully tries to steer them into trickier waters. When Avery’s past gets the better of her, he takes an understandable step back to give her space, but he never retreats entirely and he thankfully doesn’t play any jealousy games with her to get her to see what she’s missing. He lets realization come to her on her own terms, and we can’t help but want to hug him for his maturity and his unwavering understanding of Avery even when she doesn’t understand herself.

Flirty and beautifully romantic but with no shortage of dark undertones, Wait For You is one destined for the re-read shelf.

Rating: 4/5

TRUST IN ME
Wait for You #1.5
Jennifer Armentrout/J. Lynn
Contemporary New Adult
William Morrow Paperbacks
Available Now
Source: e-ARC from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
It’s Wait for You as you’ve never seen it. Trust in Me lets you in on Cam’s side of the #1 New York Times Bestselling story.

Cameron Hamilton is used to getting what he wants, especially when it comes to women. But when Avery Morgansten comes crashing into his life – literally – he finally meets the one person who can resist his soulful baby blues. But Cam’s not ready to give up. He can’t get the feisty and intriguing girl out of his head.

Avery has secrets, secrets that keep her from admitting the feelings Cam knows she has for him. Will persistence (and some delicious homemade cookies) help him break down her barriers and gain her trust? Or will he be shut out of Avery's life, losing his first real shot at the kind of love that lasts forever?

MY THOUGHTS
Trust in Me gives us Cam’s insight into his sometimes-difficult-but-ultimately-hugely-rewarding relationship with Avery, a treat for Cam lovers everywhere who always wondered what was going on behind the charmingly self-aggrandizing statements. The beginning is a bit tedious simply due to the fact that the main draw in the very beginning of Wait for You was the outrageousness of the things that came out of his mouth as he tried to woo her with varying degrees of seriousness, but the anticipation of “what will he say next” is absent in this story because we already know the answer given the dialogue is obviously unchanged. The things we're really interested in knowing come later, our curiosity lying almost completely in how the small clues about what happened to Avery in the past affect him, and in that regard, this novella does not disappoint.

The highlight though is the fleeting glimpse of Jase’s life Cam’s perspective gives us, our knowledge of him perhaps a single step above zero after spending our time in Avery’s head first, and there are clearly innumerable facets to him that never registered with us until now. With his and Tess’s story next on the horizon, Trust in Me builds the anticipation beautifully until we’re practically salivating in the end, desperate to see how these two will fit together, and extraordinarily curious to see how Cam will handle one of his best friends making a play for his sister.

Rating: 3.5/5
 

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