Review: Rule by Jay Crownover

You can bet your sweet behind that the second I hear about a romance novel that features a tattooed/pierced bad boy as the hero, that I’ll be all over it. It wouldn’t matter if he was a liar and a cheater… If he’s got a body covered in ink and piercings in all the right places then that’s all I care about. Alright, I'm kidding… (Kind of) …But seriously, let’s face it: There’s just something about a bad boy that always kicks our libido into overdrive so there’s really no sense in denying it.

Rule definitely had the piercings, tattoos, and bad boy factor down to a T… But for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, I wasn’t blown away with his character or this book. Don’t get me wrong… The story-line was good and kept me interested… It just wasn’t great. The characters all seemed a little young in my opinion. The way the hero and heroine handled certain situations was a bit over the top and pretty immature. I couldn’t help but feel like both characters had the mentality of a teenager…Especially Rule. …And sadly, that just isn’t a characteristic that I like to consider “drool worthy”. Rule did have one extremely drool-worthy moment though, so it’s only fair to give credit where credit’s due and share a quote that actually did make me swoon:


"If you want to harass someone, scare someone, terrorize someone, you might want to pick someone that doesn’t have a pissed off boyfriend waiting around the corner…"


I don’t want to give anything away in this review by elaborating on a lot of details, so I’ll just cut to the chase… Throughout the entire book I had no doubt in my mind that Shaw loved Rule- She had been in love with him since she was thirteen and nothing or no one ever got in the way of her feelings for him. She loved him for who he was on the inside and the out, and had never once wanted him to be anyone but himself. Rule on the other hand… Even by the end of the story, I just never really felt like his feelings for Shaw were reciprocated as strongly. Sure, I knew he had feelings for her… But it never felt like love to me- I wasn’t ever able to convince myself that his feelings for her went beyond the fact that she was just the one woman who had ever accepted him for who he was. Perhaps I’m being a bit biased when writing this review, since Cherrie Lynn’s book Rock Me is an absolute favorite book of mine and I’ve yet to find a similar story out there that can compete with that one. For me, although this story had its differences from that book it had double the similarities and I just felt that it paled in comparison.

Grammatical errors seemed to be a big deal breaker for a lot of readers out there when it came to this novel, but surprisingly it really didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I was a bit distracted at times, but I never felt like the distraction was big enough to give the book a lesser rating. Over-all, Rule just fell a little flat for me… There was a lot of conflict, emotion, and drama but something was just missing. It had all the makings of a perfect five-star read but it just never quite reached that potential. I wouldn’t rule out (no pun intended) any future books by this author, but I can’t say that I cared enough about any of these characters to want to read more about them.