Finding North by Carmen Jenner

Finding North by Carmen Jenner

Review by Lauren

source: personal copy; all opinions are my own

Official Summary: Red Maine’s blue-collared bad boy, North Underwood, has a dirty little secret—Will Tanner.

Friends since kindergarten, North had been the one to jump first, and his fall into Will’s bed ten years ago had been no exception. Will and North had been inseparable, but things change, people grow apart, and even a blazing flame can dwindle to a dying ember over time.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

After a run in with a bottle of Bundy rum, Will and North find themselves in a compromising and all too familiar position.

Blurred lines, bad decisions, and one wrong foot after another lead these two down a spiral of sarcasm, secrets, and sex, but when North’s hetero status is called into question he can’t figure up from down. And despite Will telling himself he wouldn’t fall again, he’s head over heels and wandering without a compass.

Love is love.

Love is truth.

Love … shouldn’t be this damn hard to figure out.

Review: I've had a lot of ebooks saved on my wish list on Amazon, so I decided to grab some of them recently when I could and finally read them. One of these was obviously Finding North. I gave this 4 stars on Goodreads, but I left a comment saying it's really more of a 3.5 read. It's good, but it's not something I'd tell people to run out and ready right away. However, it kept me engaged well enough and I'm happy to have it read in the end.

What surprised me a bit about this one is how Will and North are both pretty similar to each other when it comes to their temper. Both of them let people and circumstances get to them and react with violence. Granted, Will does this a lot less than North, but it did surprise me to realize. I thought North would have been the more reactive character. At any rate, the two of them together seems to work well. Of course, North doesn't seem to want himself to be happy. He lets fear and other people dictate his life and while it made sense when he was a kid, he's a grown adult now and he's still letting life slip by him. Instead, he's sleeping with random girls, working in the mill with his alcoholic deadbeat father, and drinking himself at the local pub...where childhood friend Will lives and works with his own father.

I appreciated the fear that North had about being open to loving Will. You get enough from their past to understand it. I did think they seemed like an odd pairing when they were younger, because North seems to push Will into doing what he wants, in a way. It's not that Will doesn't want some of the same things - especially concerning loving North - but it just seemed as if North made some of those decisions for him in the beginning. I don't know how much this makes sense without giving things away though!

In the end, this was good, not great, but hey, they can't all be 5-star reads! I do want to mention that the cover model is Will, not North. You tend to think if someone's name is in the title, then they are on the cover, but the description of Will is definitely the model.