Naked Review

Brynne Bennett is living the good life. An American art student at the University of London and part-time photographic model, she’s putting her life back on track with school and lots of hard work. When ultra successful London businessman, Ethan Blackstone, buys her nude portrait, he isn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer. He wants Brynne in his bed and makes plans to keep her there no matter what. His dominant nature captivates and ensnares despite the demons she carries inside her. But there are secrets in this relationship. Huge ones. Can Ethan free Brynne from the past that has marked her? Will Brynne let him or will the specters tormenting her resurface to destroy them both…
I’ve heard a lot of positive things about this series and for that reason alone, I’ve been dying to read the books for months now but I was umming and ahhhing over the high kindle price.  When a book is £5.99, as it was at the time of buying, a certain expectation is set up.  After all, I’m used to paying no more than £2.99 for an ebook most of the time and often just 99p or less gets you a fantastic read.  So, let me summarise for you – Naked was hyped up, not only by bloggers but also by authors and the high price set up a high expectation for me (if it’s pricey, it must be good, right?)

Not necessarily so.  Sadly, this book suffered from ‘over hype syndrome’ for me.  Naked is set in London and whilst our main protagonist, Brynne (and I assume the author) is American, her love interest, come sexy alpha male, successful CEO Ethan Blackstone is British.   I think considering *I* am British, you might know where I’m going with this next sentence.  Because I’m British, I picked up on a lot of mistakes, things that didn’t sound quite right, things us Brits wouldn’t say.  The editor in me also picked up some niggles over word choices. I have no idea if this book was self published at the time, whether it had an editor or whether it has been edited since but all it needed was a British person to look over it and forgive me if I’m wrong but it doesn’t look to me like that took place.

Naked is a really fast read despite the fact that nothing really happened apart from the constant push and pull between Ethan and Brynne.  There was no relationship build up, no getting to know each other, just pure animal attraction and primal urges although apparently, Ethan WANTS a relationship with her.  The question is why?  At first I thought it was just about sex but it appears that Ethan knows a lot more about her than he’s letting on and I’m looking forward to (hopefully) seeing this information surface properly in book two.  That’s right, despite the negatives so far, the book was at least somewhat entertaining and whilst there were no satisfying conclusions to ANY of the themes/sub plots within the book, I still want to read the next book - mostly because Naked felt like it was only the beginning of a bigger book.  I’m not sure how many physical pages there are since I read it on my kindle but it felt like half a book to me.   I really enjoyed the set up and I like reading about alpha male characters.  I do sometimes think though that it would be funny if one of these days, the woman just turned round to the overbearing, control freak of a guy and told them to fuck off otherwise she would get a restraining order.  I guess there wouldn’t be much of a story then though, more of a short novella ;)

This is a very difficult review for me to write as I strive to be true to myself and my blog readers whilst being respectful to writers and I really do want to love all the books.  With a heavy heart, I’m sad to say that Naked wasn’t as good as I’d hoped and whilst it was entertaining, it certainly doesn’t warrant the high kindle price.  Sorry.

Naked was originally published in August, 2012. To find out more about Raine Miller and her books, please click here to visit her website.