Climbing Stories

3.5 stars for first half
4 stars for second half & potential of the series
Welcome to 50 shades of eff'd up, Sebastian Baas style. WARNING: Haters of dubious consent, rough sex, and crazy, deranged, stalkerific, very violent heroes need NOT enter

Typical:Heroine, Taylor, is laughably in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she stumbles across some serious shit. The hero, Sebastian Baas, comes to her rescue, kind of...well really he presents himself as the lesser of two evils and Sebastian gets her to go on date with him.

Because the reader is in his head as well as Taylor's, you know that it is only a matter of time before Sebastian takes over completely. He hates the company she keeps, he thinks her family is shit, and he hates where she lives. Of course, Sebastian's cause is helped by the fact that Taylor is a virgin and she has that sweetly annoying trait where she is so trusting and selfless--so obviously, she must attract a possessive, dark and tortured hero.

Sebastian revels in this because it makes it easy to totally dominate her, and this condition makes it easy to mold Taylor into the kind of woman he needs in his life.

He’d known she was special from the first moment he saw her, but for Taylor it had been a matter of her finding her place. Knowing her place. Now, not only did she understand, but also she accepted. Even with the gentle reminder, she’d gone out of her way to please him and was still eager for his touch. She truly was the perfect woman in so many ways.

The writing pulled it off because I wanted to hate Sebastian, but I couldn't. His world and conflict within it was probably not as realistic, but it was believable. Sebastian's only redeeming quality is that he is a uber-faithful one-woman-man. Yet, he is deceptively consistent in character in that he leaves very obvious breadcrumbs for Taylor to figure out what kind of KRAZY she's gotten herself into with him, not to mention all the warning signs and major red flags she witnesses from his family, friends and co-workers.

So though it was easy to get engrossed in the story, I wasn't sympathetic to the heroine at all, especially when at 84% into the story, she wonders

What had she done? In some sick way, she couldn’t help but feel she was partially to blame. Leaving him had never been her intention. At least not then. Now—now, she wasn’t so sure. Her mind argued she should.

Sebastian's friend Josh definitely stanches that thought with...

“It doesn’t matter how you got yourself into this, kiddo. There’s no getting out.”

And he's right because it's goes from this

To This

TO THIS!

And I am like...

Am I really about to read the next one?