Review: After I Fall

After I Fall by Jessica Scott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars

Parker has had it with following her father and fiancé's orders, she wants to break free. When the offer of an internship leads her to the hot new bar The Pint, it's the owner who may be the chance of a lifetime.
Eli is out of the Army but you can't take the Army out of the man. His bar has become a haven for vets and as their pseudo commander, he watches over them all. When a high society miss, who he turned down the night before, comes in wanting the internship, he knows his world is about to be shaken up.

After I Fall, is the third installment of the Falling series. I haven't read the previous books and never felt lost, there are obvious previous characters and I think our hero and heroine are in the others but their romance starts here. Even though Parker and Eli are in their mid-twenties and thirties, this had a very New Adult feel to it. Each chapter is a pov change between the two, which is not a personal favorite of mine. The author did the changes fairly frequently, even in the middle of scenes, which had a tendency to break the scene for me and give a stop and go feel, keeping me out of the flow.

Parker was our poor little rich girl and Eli our bad boy soldier. This story was very trope heavy but every once in a while, there was a hint of nuances with the two that made them stand out a little bit. Parker has an abusive boyfriend and a rich daddy who doesn't pay attention to her but her business knowledge, she's trying to get into Grad school for her MBA, pops up to blow Eli out of the water with how he should market his business. Eli seems very still waters run deep but I didn't feel like we ever really got to dive into him. His big secret isn't revealed until around the 80% mark and while it was laid out, we never got the time to emotionally invest in it. However, the issues with how alienated soldiers feel when they return to civilian life and the complexity of how to manage and live with their emotions from living through war were dropped in here and there. The nuances are there but they weren't delved into or weaved in enough to become felt.

I couldn't help but feel slightly annoyed with Parker, her issue is written in a way that the heart of it seems to be that she simply won't go against her father's directives because then she'd have to pay rent for her own apartment; the father and fiancé villain characters were very underdeveloped. It's brought up that she tried to rebel once with a friend but once again, it's dropped in but never flushed out so we're left not really thinking much of it or getting an emotional impact from it. I had a hard time believing in Eli and Parker's relationship, the focuses is pretty much on them being angst-y sexually attracted to each other with Parker thinking the whole time she'll have to marry her fiancé and Eli thinking he could never be good enough for her.

The author has created a series with a handful of characters with deep troubled issues but the lack of depth and emotionally weaving them into the story hurt this installment. I believe Parker and Eli were sexually attracted to each other but not sure I buy into their long-term relationship.


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