Sweet Damage by Rebecca James

Release Date: Out now!

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 336pgs

The Story

When Tim Ellison finds a cheap room to rent in the perfect location in Sydney it looks like a huge stroke of luck. In fact the room comes with a condition, and the owner of the house, the mysterious Anna London, is unfriendly and withdrawn. When strange and terrifying things start happening in the house at night, Tim wonders if taking the room is a mistake. But then his feelings for Anna start to change, and when her past comes back with a vengeance, Tim is caught right in the middle of it.

The Review

A big thanks to Allen & Unwin for sending me a review copy of this book!

This is the first book I've read of Rebecca James and apparently this is a companion sequel to her first book, Beautiful Malice, which I haven't read yet though I have heard some pretty great things about it too. So, I'm sure many readers who loved that debut book will come to love this companion book as well because by the sounds of it it has this very similar vibe to that first book so I may need to check out Beautiful Malice soon to compare the two books and see what happens there.

SWEET DAMAGE, for me at least, was the perfect title for this particular book because that's exactly what it was - a book all about sweet damaged people with broken pasts. Perfect really, right? Anyway, I won't get into the major details of the book considering the book itself IS pretty complicated and very hard to explain to other readers, but I will say the author did create quite an interesting read and it was something a little out of my own comfort zone too, which I don't mind in the least. 

Now while I can't necessarily say I really liked this book in the way I wanted to since there were times where I had lost interest in the storyline instead of engaging in it, but once you keep reading and going towards the end of the book, you will soon get rewarded with a very different contemporary story and one that ended up being an 'okay' one at that. The characters, especially, helped me like this book even more than the physical storyline because they were so strange and yet so fascinating at the same time too. I quite enjoyed them.

Overall, SWEET DAMAGE may not be everyone's cup of tea but regardless the author, Rebecca James, did wrote an extremely well-written book.

The Rating

3/5 stars