Matthew North waited ten years to heal from the devastating wounds inflicted by the man who abducted and abused him as a child. Living reclusively on a tropical island—with no company but his four cats—he merely avoids the lingering pain.
Wearing twisted ropes of mutilated skin on his back, Matt struggles with a profound hindrance—the scars that deaden his soul. However, on the night he meets lively Vedie Wilson, a local restaurant busboy who expresses his gender by wearing lipgloss and eyeliner along with his three-day beard, things change.
Gradually, Vedie and Mateo unite in friendship. Through a series of awkward encounters, the pair learns each other’s secrets. Vedie learns that an angelic face can front for a scarred soul. Matthew learns that the line between one’s masculine and feminine sides is blurred. Can they embrace the painful stories behind each other’s scars if they’re to find everlasting love? Or will surrendered love come to be yet another blemish on their souls?
If you like a story with a cast of interesting characters, a bucket load of hurt and a couple of armfuls of angst then this is a book for you. Mia kerick has done a fabulous job with this story, taking two very different characters and showing that however hard the path they'd each travelled was, love can win the day.
Both of these characters were dealing with the pain of abuse. The sources of abuse were different and both were dealing with it in their own way - but there was a common understanding between the two that others couldn't get. Through the story we see Matthew and Vedie battling against the scars of both the past and the present to try and make something, anything, work.
I think Mia Kerick was very clever with her writing of this story. I think it would have been very easy to get caught up in the abduction Matthew suffered as a child and let this overshadow the rest of the book. Kerick was careful though, not to let that happen. We learnt about the abduction, we even had journal entries about it that Matthew had written after the fact, but it never became more than the story between Vedie and Matthew. Matthew's story was about the aftermath of the events from his childhood. How it affected him now. How it made him the reclusive cat lover we are introduced too. It was about his survival and how, with Vedie, he started to live again.
Vedie seemed as opposite to Matthew as it was possible to get. Not just because of his gender-fluidity, but because, where Matthew portrayed as a colour would be a deep, calm blue, Vedie is a vibrant mass of eclectic shades that work together perfectly but can't fail to be noticed. He is so likeable. So strong and vulnerable. I would love to know him, to see the brightness in the world he sees, even though he has so much evidence of pain.
This story was everything I hoped it would be, and more. It focused on the two characters and how their own experiences guided the lives they lived. The lives they had lived and the way to move forward. There are many painful moments in the story, some in the past and some in the now. Of all the pain experienced, I have to say, for me, one of the most hurtful was Matthew's mother. I wonder if this is because I am a mother myself and I cannot, won't even try to, imagine the pain of my child taken from me. I felt enormous pain for her at the start.., but then, how she was with Matthew, with Matthew and Vedie made me so angry. I know if I'd been given a second chance with my child I wouldn't waste a second of it.
A book that is well worth a read.
A copy of this book was given in exchange for an honest review.
For more information, see Goodreads.
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Great review <3 <3
ReplyDeleteThank you. xx
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