Review: Stormking Road

Stormking Road by T.L. Haddix
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

How odd!

So I was drawn in by the unusual blurb but ended up confused by what genre I was reading.

On the face of it this is a straightforward small-town romance between Sydney Gibson, a 26 year old woman, and Sawyer Evans, the 46 year old man she has had a crush on since she was six years old. She comes back to the small town she grew up in after a devastating divorce. Not needing money, she does need a job to keep her busy so her father suggests she help Sawyer with his fledgling private investigations business.

Sawyer used to be a policeman and has the dubious honour of having arrested Sydney as a teenager, he remembers a rebellious teenager and is shocked at the young sophisticated woman she has become. Despite their mutual attraction he tries to hold back because: a) he's her boss; b) he's 20 years older than her; c) he's friends with her father and grandfather; and d) he has some rare incurable sterility so he could never give her children.

I quite liked the romance, it was a slow burn and there was some good banter, especially between Sydney and various women who drape themselves all over Sawyer.

But ...

Sydney and her family all have special powers. Yep, special powers. Now this is the sixth book in the series, I haven't read any of the rest so I'm not sure whether the other books are more or less woo-woo than this one, but this just seemed odd. Sydney has some odd healing power, they think she may have cured her aunt's cancer when she was younger, one of her cousins can see/ speak to the dead and other relatives are different kinds of shifters. As far as I could see this was just an excuse to abracadabra an insurmountable obstacle (can you guess what it might be?). I didn't get it. I also thought it was odd that they all had different powers - surely genetics would suggest they all had the same power or manifestations of the same power?

There were also a couple of scenes which crossed a line for me. I don't mind rough sex between consenting adults but when one person uses it to express sadness by biting, pinching, hair-pulling etc and it is out of the ordinary that actually raises red flags for me. Expressing emotion through violence? Not acceptable. The other scene is where Sydney and Sawyer have sex before meeting his ex-wife - as I read that scene I thought if it were written about anyone other than the heroine it would have been seen as trashy and tacky - so why is it okay for Sydney to do/ think that?

If those two scenes had been written differently and there were no special woo-woo powers I would have liked this book a lot more.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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