Bared To You by Sylvia Day

Hello my dearies!

I hope the changing season is treating you well and you have as nice a mixture of morning fog and daytime sun as I'm having at the moment. It's kind of inspiring, actually (horror story, anyone?). But that's not what I want to write about today.

Today, I want to share with you my views of a particular book...no, not the one with the grey. This one...

(ps. I'm an Amazon Associate so if you buy this book via this link you may earn me money)

BARED TO YOU

(A Crossfire Novel)

by 

Silvia Day

I picked it up as a travel read, mainly (and yes, I'm one of those gullible consumers) because it basically said on the cover "this is the book Shades of xyz could have been" if it had been well written. Seeing as the quality of writing in the Shades books is up for debate, I was curious. Curious enough to shell out hard-earned money for an erotic romance that might well turn out to be a waste of the paper it was written on. 

Long story short: Not a waste of paper. I was happily surprised, in fact. 

What it's about....

Meet Eva, female MC and the girl who just moved to Manhattan for a new job. She's sharing a flat with her (gay/bisexual) picture-perfect best friend Cary. It's when she first visits the building she'll be working at, that's when she meets Gideon for the first time. It's only later that she finds out he's in fact Gideon Cross, owner of said building (The Crossfire), control freak, male MC and uber-handsome sexy beast. Cue sexual attraction....

What I liked and what not... 

This book is worlds above That Other Trilogy everyone is talking about. The narrative is fluent, Ms Day knows how to write, the characters are convincing (up to a point) and the story is sufficiently coherent. 

Keeping in mind that this is an erotic romance, as opposed to a plain old romance or, say, a romantic comedy, it's not surprising that there's a lot of sex going on. Orgasms and erections abound. I've read some other reviews of the book and heard that this was a surprise and a bother for some people, but let me tell you, I've read a lot of erotic romances and this is par for the course (duh). Sylvia Day pulls it off fairly well, too - there's some repetition, but hey, it's still well written and easy to read. 

Eva and Gideon are both interesting characters, both with surprising depths, even if some creepiness comes into it on occasion (Gideon is a little obsessive and Eva has her own problems). That Gideon is a  bit of a stalker feeds into the whole control-freak thing, which probably has its roots in the alluded-to but not explained trauma he experienced as a child (there's two more books to come, after all, so no wonder not everything is resolved in the first one). Eva herself has issues with control, though it's unclear which side of the question she falls on - does she want to have control, or give it up? In this book, at least, I don't think she knows herself, even if she insists on needing control over her own life. Eva's lack of extreme reaction to Gideon's more - radical - stalkery actions is easy enough to understand given that her own mother tracks her every move. 

At least they take the (in my eyes) very american way of going to therapy to resolve their issues, so there's some hope that by the end of the series, they'll be slightly less...damaged? Neurotic? Creepy? 

I like them anyway, and I've already pre-ordered the second Crossfire book. 

You should consider this book if...

I'm not going to say "consider it if you liked Shades", because really, did you like Shades? Really? Other than congratulating Ms James on her lottery win of a publishing feat? You should, however, consider this book if you like tormented and conflicted characters with serious and somewhat worrying issues, high heat levels and lots of sex scenes, date-the-millionaire stories and tendencies towards BDSM.