SOME KIND OF LOVE by ANNA BLOOM

“You once told me you thought our love was too easy…is it hard enough for you now?”

Amber French and Freddy Bale’s love was written in the stars. High school sweethearts who seemed destined to be together forever until a turn of events sees Amber flee their smalltown without a peep until her return some ten years later.

Now, twenty-eight, Amber French must face the love of her life. The boy who has invaded her thoughts and dreams for the last ten years, and the catalyst for everything that has happened during her absence. Amber returns with secrets that could cause further pain for all concerned.

“We could have been everything.”
“Freddy, we are everything…”

Some Kind of Love is a second-chance smalltown romance with a wonderful hero in Freddy Bale. This man’s patience and ability to forgive are beyond measure. Many a man would have handled Amber’s deceit somewhat differently.

Although Freddy was responsible for their breakup ten years earlier, his heart was in the right place at the time, but he couldn’t have envisaged the fallout his words would generate. Young Freddy thought he was doing the right thing for Amber but would soon learn the devastating consequences of his actions.

“Why?”
“Why what?”
Why do you love me?
“Because for ten, very long years, I couldn’t forget the smallest bit of you. You’re mapped into my soul.”

We adore Anna Bloom’s stories. This author always finds a way to burrow into our hearts and some parts of this story did just that. We loved the Bale family and Amber’s friend Dani, who brought another dimension to Freddy and Amber’s second chance love story. We’d love to hear more of the Bale brothers in future books, that’s for sure.

Amber had us feeling conflicting emotions. On the one hand, we felt for this young girl who had to learn to survive on her own at such a tender age, whose heart was obliterated by the boy she loved with every fibre of her being, but Amber frustrated us in so many ways.

Amber’s secret and its eventual revelation caused us to groan at the way she handled it once it was divulged. We felt she asked way too much of Freddy, and we became frustrated when he bent to her will time and time again. Her treatment of her best friend also left us shaking our heads. Here was a girl who stood by Amber, who welcomed her back with open arms, yet Amber seemed to drop snide comments about her husband constantly. It wore a little thin with us.

But there were so many other elements to the book which we loved, and by the end, we were willing to overlook the annoyance we felt towards Amber and her actions. After all, she was young and impressionable and left to her own devices to survive, which wouldn’t have been easy.

“This love of ours wasn’t meant to be easy, Amber. I get that now. I don’t think any love is.”

Anna Bloom is a #1Click author for us and in her latest offering, she really captured the heartbreak of first love, the emotion of second chance love, and the friendliness and familiarity of smalltown living as well as the pain and happiness of recapturing those missed years.