ARC Review: The Color of Summer by Anna Martin

From the blurb:

Tattoo artist Max Marshall races into his hometown of Sweetwater, West Virginia—and is promptly pulled over for speeding. Max’s luck isn’t all bad, though, because he recognizes the deputy, Tyler Reed, Max’s childhood best friend’s older brother. 

Reconnecting with Tyler helps Max settle back in, and it also leads to attraction. But when he tries to explore that connection at the grand opening of his tattoo studio—by kissing Tyler—awkwardness ensues. Max wants more, but has he misread Tyler’s signals? 

As a single father raising a six-year-old daughter, Tyler doesn’t have much time to date. He’s ignored his attraction to men for years, but he can’t stop thinking about the kiss he shared with Max. If he can handle the complications of dating in a small town and the possible consequences to his career, this romance could blossom with all the colors of summer.

Ky's rating:

This book started out really well. Max is a tattoo artist and he's decided to move back to his hometown to open his own studio and be closer to his mother. Tyler is a police officer, the father of a six-year-old girl and Max's best friend's older brother. They meet again, hit it off, get close, start dating. Everything sounds good so far.

Add to that a team of likeable secondary characters to make the story more real, a bit of a slowburn and a self-discovery journey and the story was hitting a lot of great marks. Up until the last few chapters where everything started going south...

I don't unterstand why the story didn't end earlier other than a need for it to have more pages. The situation near the end was completely out of nowhere and I didn't see its purpose. It gave the story some action and a bit of angst but it also took away one star from my rating so, for me, it wasn't worth it.

As for June, Tyler's daughter, she spoke and behaved like she was older than her supposed age and that's always something that annoys me in books.


I feel like there was no direction to the story. The general idea was good and the characters were nice, if a little under-developed and "confused", but the final result wasn't what I hoped it would be.

I don't know if it was me or the book or both of us but this story didn't work very well for me. 3 stars, because the first half of the book was really good.




*An ARC of this book was kindly provided to me in exchange for an honest review. *

Get the book:

          

Thanks for stopping by!

Buylinks are provided as a courtesy and do not constitute an endorsement of or affiliation with this book, author or booksellers listed.