Kerri (Book Hoarder)'s Reviews > Inked Armor

I’m torn on this book because while I enjoyed it, I feel as though it could have been so much more than what it ended up being.

Hayden and Tenley are back with their usual fire and desperate need for each other, and once again I was drawn right back in to their story. Readers worried about a long, drawn out separation need not worry! In reading time, they’re not separated for long, though that doesn’t mean that things are easy… Which leads me to something that I love about these books.

So often in romance we get insta-lust or love and we get a very shallow exploration of what that means for the characters. Not so with Clipped Wings and Inked Armor. One thing I’ve loved about these two books is the fact that the author isn’t afraid to delve into her character’s psyches and really explore who they are and why they are the way they are. Their backgrounds are delved into thoroughly, their very real trauma isn’t glossed over. Both Hayden and Tenley are bruised and broken, and I’m glad that we weren’t short-changed on really understanding what that actually means.

I loved the way the author took the events of the first book and further delved into them in the second book. There's no easy resolution, the hurt feelings and conflicts that they have aren't just ignored and pushed to the side. They have to take it slow, and talk to each other more, and the whole second book is about them slowly healing from their pasts and also from what they did to each other.

Throughout this second book they slowly open up to each more and more, which I really loved seeing. It really benefits from the fact that there are two books - at twice as long as most romance novels, we get a real exploration of their deepening relationship and their feelings.

Once again the secondary characters are well thought out and interesting. Personally, I’d love to read books about Lisa and Jamie and Chris and Sarah, though who knows if that will happen!

So what was I disappointed in? Well, for starters, the antagonists remain poorly fleshed out, in my opinion. I mean, there are people who are just ‘bad’, but I wish that we’d learned more about them and maybe met some people who were kind of in the middle, and not just clearly depicted as ‘these are bad people and bad things happen to them’. The book does a good job of making them despicable but they could have used some rounding out - they’re still people, after all, not caricatures.

The major issue I had, though, was that the book felt as though it ran out of steam about halfway through, if I’m honest. It started at the beginning of the book, where we get a bare-bones description of Tenley sorting out a point that’s been a major conflict for her. We’re told ‘this happens and then I do this’. There’s no dialogue, there’s no delving into what that actually means for her. When I read it I was surprised, because all of book one had been building up to what was going to be a traumatic incident for Tenley, but then the fulfillment of that arc was weak and over quickly. Later on in the book there's another incident where I really wanted to see her stand up for herself - but instead we see her from Tenley's point of view, and the scene that I had HOPED to see play out doesn't happen, while Hayden goes storming in and is the ~hero~. Disappointing.

I was sucked back in by Hayden and Tenley’s story, though, which carried me through most of the book - damn, the two have chemistry! The sex is hot, they need each other desperately. I’d almost think that they need each other too much except for the fact that I’ve experienced relationships like this myself, as an observer and as a participant. Things aren’t easy, and I appreciated the fact that the book was quick to make that clear - there’s no instant-reunion, no quick and easy make-up. When you have two characters as battered as Tenley and Hayden, it can’t be easy if you want it to be realistic.

Then we got to the climax of the novel and things went to pot again. All of a sudden things were resolved in the span of a few pages. Hayden’s major wounds? Glossed over with a quick resolution, and we skip forward by a couple of months with no real look into how he reacts to that. Hell, when he finally agrees to go to therapy, we don’t even get to hear what he talks about! As someone who has firmly dug my heels in when it comes to therapy in the past, I find it hard to believe that there’d be nothing to tell us about when it comes to his first session, or that he’d agree to go back so willingly.

Once again, as earlier with Tenley, the major conflicts aren’t really delved into. We’re told, not shown. ‘This happens and then we did this and this is how I feel’. Um, that shit isn’t good enough when the first book and the first half of the second have gone so deeply into how broken Tenley and Hayden are. I want *more*, to be quite honest. I want to see and feel them start to heal, I don’t want to just be told that they are.

The entire latter half of the book felt rather rushed, as though the author knew what she wanted to happen but didn’t have the time or the energy to actually flesh it out with the vivid detail that we had in the first part of the book. I get that it’s easier to write out the background of what breaks a person but the most beautiful stories tell us how they become whole again, and that’s what’s missing, here.

So… yeah. I enjoyed the books, and I’d definitely recommend them. I just wish that there’d been more emotional satisfaction in them.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book through Netgalley in return for an honest review.