Review: Phoenix Rising by Jo Lynne Valerie

Phoenix Rising
By Jo Lynne Valerie
Published: May 12, 2010
Not recommended
I bought this book

Summary from Amazon...

Holly is a successful, eccentric artist who has given up on love. A best-selling novelist hires Holly, asking her to "Paint my hero, my leading man..."
After Holly paints all day and all night, a face has come to life on her canvas. Imagine Holly's surprise when she meets the man she painted - IN REAL LIFE - just days later.
David is a divorced single father, a wolf biologist. On a deep winter night, their paths converge and passion ignites. David surprises both Holly and himself when he asks her to go away with him and his son, for the holidays...
But Holly is held prisoner by devastating heartbreak and a horrifying secret. Can she trust David with what is locked in the farthest recesses of her heart?
As the trio travels southwest for the holidays, the connection and intensity grows between Holly and David. In an end the reader will not see coming, Holly's mystery is solved at last - and a new path beckons them all.

Oh man. Heavy sigh.
This book just wasn't very good, with a number of things that didn't work. First of all, several chapters needed serious editing. The punctuation (waaaay too many commas) was bad enough to be distracting.
Secondly, and most importantly, I felt like the author came up with what she thought was a great idea for a twist, but never fully developed the story leading up to it, or the repercussions after the reveal (which WAS pretty easy to see coming.) There really isn't much going on for the majority of the book and when something finally DOES happen, something that means great change for everyone (and is actually quite disturbing for one of the characters) everything gets summed up in two of the cheesiest pages I have ever read. Seriously. I felt like the author had no respect for her characters and I was quite disappointed with this one. It's too bad, really, because the author has a great blog and posts lots of interesting things on her various social network accounts. As a matter of fact, I think she would kick ass at non-fiction writing as there were some lovely descriptions of New Mexico in the book AND she does really interesting posts on astrology and the like.
On a personal note here, it's really difficult to write a negative review! There is almost a sense of guilt but ultimately I felt like I had to be completely honest about how I felt and not sugarcoat it. I want you all to know that I will always give my honest opinion about a book, good or bad. Not every book is for everybody and this one just wasn't for me.