Review: Quiet Longing by L.H. Cosway

“I glanced at Charli, and that feeling of intense connection swept through me. It was getting stronger by the day. How was it that my gaze was always drawn to her?” (p. 183)

★★☆☆☆
🌶🌶

Series: Quiet Love, Book 2

Review:

First, I would like to thank the author and Grey's Promotions for providing me with an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A slow-burn second chance at a first love

Charli spends her summer break in Ireland before heading off to college, and despite all the warnings from her cousins and inside her own mind, she can’t stop herself from falling for Rhys. She’s returning home when summer ends and he’s joining the French Foreign Legion, so they have no chance as a couple and are bound to end up heartbroken. Sixteen years later, Charli returns to Ireland, but she’s a broken woman. Starting over after divorcing her abusive husband, she suffers from panic attacks and lacks self-worth. Rhys has recently ended his engagement, but he wants to give Charli space to heal, and she knows neither of them is ready to jump into something new. Fate, however, has different plans.

Quiet Longing is the second book in the Quiet Love series, and it can be read as a standalone. It is told in dual POV, allowing the reader to experience both Charli and Rhys’s emotions and reactions to situations. The first half of the book is spent exploring Charli’s first visit to Ireland, and the second half covers their reunion. To be honest, the book could have been half as long and would have made a bigger impact. At nearly 500 pages, with fifty percent spent on their teenage summer fling, it was drawn out far too long, causing me to lose interest. In addition, Charli’s mother’s big secret behind why she and her brother had a falling out seemed like it would be a crucial facet of the story, but unfortunately, it didn’t amount to much beyond being more background trauma. Sadly, the longer this book continued, the less I wanted to finish it, and when I reached the final page, I was disappointed by the abrupt ending after all that time spent leading up to it.

Quiet Longing is a very slow-burn love story that is moderate in spice with characters who are too emotionally unavailable or too selfless to make the leap of faith into starting a real relationship beyond being friends with benefits. While this book did not work for me, it has a very high overall rating, so I would recommend giving it a read and forming your own opinion.

Audience: adult
Trigger warnings: death of a parent, parental abandonment, domestic violence (off-page), toxic relationship, PTSD, body shaming, ableism
Recommended for fans of: second chance romance, slow-burn romance, dual timelines (told consecutively), first love, starting over, workplace romance, tragic past, protective MMC, standalone

Publisher's Synopsis:

When she agreed to spend her last summer before college at her cousins’ house in Ireland, Charli Moretti never expected to meet anyone like Rhys Doyle. He was the first boy to ever make her heart flutter, and though their lives followed different paths after that fateful summer, she always remembered him as her first everything.

Sixteen years later, after a tumultuous divorce from her abusive husband, Charli is returning to Ireland a shell of the woman she once was. Life has tried to break her many times over, and now all she wants is a fresh start and an even keel. She’ll be working as an accountant at her uncle’s hotel, but what she doesn’t know is that Rhys Doyle works there, too. He’s the head of security, in fact, and he’s no longer the teenage boy she once knew.

With the rumours flying around that he and his fiancée just broke off their engagement, Charli decides it’s best to give Rhys his space. She knows personally how hard it can be when a relationship ends. The problem is, she can’t seem to stop running into him, and the more she gets to know the man he’s become the more those old feelings start to return.

Source:

Grey's Promotions

©L.H. Cosway: October 29, 2024
Edition: Digital ARC, but read on Kindle Unlimited
494 pages


Start reading the Quiet Love series on Kindle Unlimited, or purchase your copies today!
1. Quiet Types: https://amzn.to/3O1nJ1b
2. Quiet Longing: https://amzn.to/40GBvhl
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