Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
And they cried, all of them, for the family they’d never really had and the thing they were losing without realizing, until now, how so very badly they all needed it.
Ethan, like many of the others at Johnnies, has a dark past. Being sexually abused as a child and then denied the affection every child deserves, he craves touch in a way that most people hunger for food. Johnnies has provided that for him, a promise of affection and closeness, a way to feed his need.
When he meets Jonah, he’s not looking for a boyfriend, but Jonah’s persistent and buries himself underneath Ethan’s skin. But can Ethan risk giving up the consistent touch for the possibility of something more?
That feeling of connection, of being a part of another human being’s heart—he was starting to see how Ethan could treasure that above his dignity, above his self-worth, above everything he’d ever been taught about a moral code.
So here’s the thing, I love the this series. It grabs my heart and doesn’t let it go. I think because I loved the first two books so much, this one just didn’t measure up to the sheer awesomeness that was them, and that’s why I’m left feeling a bit deflated after finishing it.
The beginning felt a bit schizophrenic to me. It was hard to follow at times and I was beginning to wonder if maybe it was just being profound in a way that I couldn’t quite grasp, or it was trying to be and I wasn’t connecting on that level. It just didn’t flow as well as I would’ve liked.
It also took me a bit to adjust to the fact that what was going on in this book was almost all of what we’d seen from another perspective in the other books. It threw me off at first, as I was expecting to see more of the story, but we didn’t get much of that. Instead, we got the same events from Ethan’s point of view, which was fine, just a bit odd at first.
My favorite part of this story was actually Amelia. I’ve been through a situation of seeing someone dying and having to face it, and becoming so tired, and I resonated with that in this book. I also felt that the part about not being a fighter, and how that’s okay, was incredibly beautiful. It wasn’t something I had thought of before, but it hit me right in the chest.
Overall, a good book, but it didn’t measure up to the first two for me.
The cover art by Reese Dante is nice, and again works well with the others in the series. Unfortunately, I still have the same problem with the font as I did previously. It’s so blocky and doesn’t fit the feeling of the stories. Also, while the guy on the cover could very well be Ethan, I just don’t know beyond that how much personality it has that fits with the story itself. So a nice general cover, but maybe not the best fit for this particular story.
Sales Links: Dreamspinner Press* All Romance (ARe) Amazon 
*available in paperback and audiobook
Book Details:
ebook, 350 pages
Published October 4th 2013 by Dreamspinner Press (first published October 3rd 2013)
ISBN 162798318X (ISBN13: 9781627983181)
edition languageEnglish, seriesJohnnies #3
charactersDavid “Dex” Worral, Carlos “Kane” Ramirez, Tommy “Tango” Halloran, Evan “Ethan” Costa
The Johnnies Series:
- Super Sock Man (Granby Knitting, #2)
- Chase in Shadow (Johnnies, #1)
- Dex in Blue (Johnnies, #2)
- Ethan in Gold (Johnnies, #3)
- Black John (Johnnies, #4)
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 