Blog Tour - Better When He's Bold by Jay Crownover + Giveaway!

Title: Better When He's Bold (Welcome to the Point #2)

Author: Jay Crownover

Publisher: William Morrow

Release Date: February 3, 2015

Source: ARC from Publisher

Buy the Book: Amazon / Book Depository / Indigo / B&N

Some men are just better when they’re bold.

Welcome to the Point…

In a dark and broken kingdom, a ruler has to be fearless to control the streets and the ruthless people who run them.

Race Hartman is just bold enough, just smart enough, and just lost enough to war the crown. Places like the Point will always have bad things and bad people, but the man in control of all that badness can minimize the devastation. Race has a plan, but can he prevent told annihilation without destroying himself?

Brysen Carter has always seen her best friend’s brother for what he is—too pretty, too smooth, and way too dangerous to touch. Basking in Race’s golden glow is very tempting, but Brysen knows she’d eventually get burned.

When she starts receiving threatening texts and someone tries to take her out in the parking lot, the only person interested in keeping her safe is the one man she can’t allow herself to have. 

Sometimes being bold is the only way to stay alive. But can she let Race save her life…if it means losing herself to him?

Last year, I discovered Jay Crownover when I read the first book in her Welcome to the Point series, Better When He’s Bad, and pretty much fell in love. I was really looking forward to reading the next one, Better When He’s Bold. And I loved it even more than the first one.

After having taken down the man running the Point, Race Hartman stepped up and took over. The way Race sees things, if he doesn’t run the Point, someone worse will do it and it will be like nothing has changed. But running the Point means Race is forced to make some difficult decisions, decisions he doesn’t always agree with. But the criminal activity in the Point is not what scares Race. What really scares him is losing himself to the Point. Brysen has always stayed away from the point, but when she meets Race Hartman, her best friend’s older brother, she keeps being pulled in that direction. She knows that she should stay away from Race, that nothing good can come of being with him, but she can’t fighting her attraction to him is becoming more and more difficult. When it seems like someone is out to kill her, Race becomes the person Brysen can turn to, the one person who seems to care enough to try to uncover what is really happening. Relying on Race is something Brysen never thought she would do. But if he’s the only person who can save her life, she’s willing to do it. The more time she spends with him though, she worries she might lose herself to him and to the Point. 

I am a total sucker for New Adult and have been ever since I picked up my first New Adult book almost two years ago. Since then, I’ve been reading any and all NA book I can get my hands on. With reading so much of it though, I’ve come to expect certain things. But with Jay Crownover’s books, or at least her Welcome to the Point series, what I get is completely different from the other NA books I read. Don’t get me wrong, the romance is still there and there is plenty of it. But these books are also a lot darker and a lot grittier than what I would normally read. But I love it. There’s just something about reading a story where you aren’t entirely sure if anyone is going to make it out in one piece, or how much they’re going to have to sacrifice in order to get out of everything alive. So needless to say that I tore through Better When He’s Bold. This story picked up shortly after everything that happened in Better When He’s Bad and focused on different characters but I was able to jump right in because I knew the world and the people. And the story was just engrossing. I wanted to know who was after Brysen, why they were so intent on killing her. I wanted to know (and still want to know) who is threatening Race’s precarious hold on the Point. And like with any good NA book, it certainly didn’t hurt that I loved the romance part of the story. Much like with the first book in this series, the romance in Better When He’s Bold is definitely more on the “adult” end of the New Adult spectrum. But considering the setting of the story, it couldn’t really be any other way. It just works and it makes it all feel very real and very raw. And I loved reading about it. Though that was probably because I really liked Race and Brysen.

Race and Brysen were people I only got slight glimpses of when I was reading Better When He’s Bad. He’s Dovie’s brother and Bax’s best friend, while she is Dovie’s best friend. But in Better When He’s Bold, they were front and center, and it didn’t take long at all for me to completely fall in love with them. While I was reading, I could see how much Race struggled with what he had to do, how he saw himself as the lesser of two evils. But at the same time how afraid he was that in the long run he would become exactly what he was hoping to protect people from. But with Brysen by his side, that wasn’t going to happen. Brysen wasn’t from the point, it was a place she typically avoided, but she had been forced to make a lot of decisions that kept bringing her to the edge of the Point. But Race and Brysen were good together. Brysen brought out the good in Race and made sure he would never become what he was scared of becoming. And Race was the only person who was making sure Brysen was okay, who was actually taking care of her. And I rooted for them. I mean, how could I not? They were great together and honestly, I could have kept reading about them for much longer than the length of this book. But that’s besides the point. I also really liked how much I got to see Bax and Dovie in this story. I was happy to be able to check in on them and make sure they were still okay in light of everything. It made me happy.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I loved Jay Crownover’s Better When He’s Bold. The story was fast-paced and engrossing and I kept wanting more. For that, though, I’m just going to have to wait until the third book in the series, Better When He’s Brave comes out later this year. In the meantime, I should probably check out Jay Crownover’s other series…

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