This could have been so much better if it was so much shorter!
★★★☆☆ – CALSPIE 5.64
Title: Ship Wrecked
Author: Olivia Dade
Genre: Fiction / Contemporary / Romance
First published: 2022
Edition: Kindle e-book
Maria’s one-night-stand–the thick-thighed, sexy Viking of a man she left without a word or a note–just reappeared. Apparently, Peter’s her surly Gods of the Gates co-star, and they’re about to spend the next six years filming on a desolate Irish island together. She still wants him…but he now wants nothing to do with her.
***
So I was in the mood for romance and this one sounded like a good time. And I guess it would have been a good time if it had not been so damn long!
I like a slowburn romance book, I like a romance with some depth to it. This one should have been that. But it was not. For a 400-page romance book, it just kind of waffled a lot without much substance.
Not that there was a complete lack of substance. I actually really liked the main characters and the supporting cast (appropriate term, as you know, it’s about a TV show). The romance at its core was actually quite nice as well. I have no qualms with either the couple itself or the majority of the writing style.
However, HOWEVER, there was a six year time jump that did not quite make sense, because you cannot tell me that there was no character or relationship development during that time, even if it’s longing from afar. I did not like that the author chose to just shift six years and nothing was supposed to have changed during that time… It made no sense! It completely threw off the pace for me.
Sometimes the plot would develop quite nicely and then suddenly there would be this big lull with nothing really happening for pages and pages. And I don’t mean smut wise. I don’t much care about that. There was some of that, but not an awful amount. I did not mind it and did not love it either. It was fine and was not super cringy (that’s a compliment). It was just that the story seemed to get stuck every few pages.
It made that by the end I lost interest almost completely and it left me feeling very disappointed and deflated by at its heart could have been a pretty good romance.
2.75 out of 5 stars
***
CALSPIE: 5.64
- Characters: 8
- Ambience: 7
- Language: 7.5
- Story: 6
- Pacing: 2
- Interest: 4
- Enjoyment: 5
Lola Et La Vie 
Well done for finishing it, I give up all too easily when a book is slow.
Thank you 🤣. I guess I kept thinking it would pick up, and I have to admit I speedread through the last 100 pages – I was in too far to DNF at that point. 😶