Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: Curl Around My Heart 
AUTHOR: Londra Laine
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
LENGTH: 210 pages
RELEASE DATE: July 24, 2018
BLURB:
At Pearl’s Hair and Nails, no one questions Tate Robinson about his high heels, crop tops, and lipstick, because he’s the boss and he can wear what he damn well pleases. The shop is his life, and he doesn’t need anything more. Until a man walks in with his adorable daughter, and Tate has to untangle her helmet-hair…and his growing feelings for the single dad.
Reece Evans has been on his job for years, has his own place, and now has custody of his eight-year-old daughter. But he doesn’t trust himself to avoid screwing up. Adulting is not his strong suit—or so he’s been told. And now a sexy beautician, who also happens to be his new downstairs neighbor, has Reece wanting and reaching for more than he thinks he’s capable of.
As Tate and Reece move past their own fears about relationships, Reece’s ex issues a threat that could destroy everything. Will Reece’s worries about other people judging him undermine his budding romance? And will Tate’s fear of rejection make him push Reece away? Or have the sweet single dad and his precocious daughter curled too tightly around his heart to give them up?
REVIEW:
Tate Robinson has had his fair share of men willing to date him. They just never seem to want to stay very long. He’s not saying it is because of the high-heels and lipstick…but, ok, yeah, that is exactly why. So he doesn’t have high hopes when Reese and his football-clad daughter wander into his shop in desperate need of his hairdressing prowess. Doesn’t stop him from taking a long look and dreaming, though. Then he finds out that Reese and LJ are his new neighbors–and that his dreams are not as un-reciprocated as he thought. But his fashion sense has long been the death-blow to every relationship he has had, and he is worried that Reese will only want him for a few nights and nothing more.
So…I guess first off, this book is set in the city I live in. Which I always find incredibly odd. Sacramento is hardly the most entertaining city in the world (or even northern California) so despite it being the capital of my state, it always seems to shock me when I find authors who have actually lived around here. I did get a laugh from how the author was able to sum up the interesting things to do in Sac in two sentences, though. Don’t think it was an intended joke–and even if it was it was certainly not anything that 99.999% of readers would care about…but, yeah, I was greatly entertained. I don’t often have first-hand knowledge about where scenes in books are set, but that wasn’t a huge problem with this book.
Leaving that little bit of self-entertainment aside, I had mixed feelings about a lot of this book. The first half(ish) of the story was certainly the stronger section of the book. Tate and Reese are well set up, and their interactions kept the scenes interesting. While I certainly can’t say I have ever enjoyed a trip to the hairdressers, the atmosphere in Tate’s shop had a flair to it that made it feel real, if a bit out of my sphere of knowledge. I had a bit of a harder time with the scenes involving LJ–Reese’s daughter. Some of her scenes were easier to handle, but she sometime took on that “small adult” role which always makes kids in books and movies feel a bit off to me. It didn’t happen all the time, so it wasn’t too big a problem, but there were some sections of dialogue–especially near the end–where the dialogue got a bit to after-school special with her.
Actually, the later part of the book, where almost every chapter was separated by time jumps of nearly two or more months, was where a lot of my problems with this story came in. Things started to feel incredibly rushed. Even though time has clearly passed so that the relationship had time to grow, I never got to see any of that so it felt like I was missing huge chunks of both their character development and the relationship. I appreciate that they were not saying “I love you” only weeks after meeting, but the growth of their relationship felt very thin because we hardly got to see any of it. I can believe that they would be in a place to say “I love you” when they did…I just didn’t buy that they actually were. Because the book didn’t do a whole lot to sell it to me.
The increase in the pace also made a lot of the climax incidents feel forced and somewhat out of nowhere. Not completely, because looking back I can see where the groundwork had been laid, but a lot of the emotional impact was undercut by how little time we got to spend with the guys up to that point. We are told that everything is going great with them until it all goes to shit, but telling me, instead of showing me, made me too removed from the characters when I needed to be right there next to them in those scenes.
There is also one other thing that made it harder for me to connect with this story than it should have. But I want to put a huge caveat next to this one. Because there is every chance that my experience with this issue is one that other readers will not have. And normally this is not something I would bring up at all, but it did have a big enough impact that it made the story significantly less enjoyable for me. So…there were some formatting issues with my copy of this book. Which, like I said, might totally be down to having received an advanced copy that was not the finished product. And while I’m not taking any stars off for this, because I fully expect these things to have been caught and fixed before publication, I do want to say that there were several times in this book where something went wonky and it completely destroyed the meaning of the sentence it was affecting. There as also dialogue that had no ending punctuation. It was….distracting. Not a swear off the book kind of distracting, but enough that I kept getting jolted out of the story every couple chapters. I can’t deny that it had an impact on my overall enjoyment of this book. I can’t say that the book would have been rated higher if the errors had not been there, but I can say that there is every chance that not having to fight with this would have lessened some of the pressure on other aspects of this book that I found difficult to overlook.
Curl Around My Heart was a good story that felt a bit hampered at times by the need to move the book along so that plot could happen. Had there been fewer time-jumps I think this could have been better, but there were also some really good character moments that helped offset the missing pieces of development. On the whole, I enjoyed it…just not nearly as much as I wanted to.
…also, fuck the Kings. Actually, fuck basketball in general…and basketballs in particular. (That’s right, I’m totally holding onto my grudge from high school P.E. where I spent nearly two months getting repeatedly slammed in the face with stupid fucking basketballs. Actually, my love of hockey might be due to the fact that I never once had to deal with getting hit by a puck growing up.)
RATING: 
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