Review: Drawn Together by Lauren Dane

Drawn Together: Raven Smith and Jonah Warner

(Brown Family #5)

Summary:

From Goodreads.com

Beauty is more than skin-deep…

Tattoo artist Raven Smith is blunt and hard, broken and jaded, dark and beautiful. While she doesn’t hide her painful past, she does keep a wall around her heart. She’s free sexually—but no one gets to the real Raven beneath the prickly exterior.

With a voice like smoke, Jonah Warner is a smooth-talking, highly successful attorney, with a body that should never be hidden by a suit. He’s the kind of man who never takes no for an answer and always gets what he wants. And what he wants is Raven. She’s a survivor, and he finds that incredibly alluring.

Jonah gets under her skin in a way Raven has never experienced. He makes her break all her rules—including her no-monogamy rule.

But when a figure from Raven’s past shows up at the tattoo parlor and drops a bomb into her life, their relationship will face the ultimate challenge…

Review:

Ok, it is official I am DNFing this book. Not so much because it is bad, but because I just dont care. I could not bring myself to care about either Jonah or Raven as a couple or as individuals. I got to about 70% of the way through the book and my little Kindle timer told me I still had over an hour and a half of reading time left and I just could not bring myself to spend over another hour reading about two characters I just didn't care about. Maybe I could have gotten over the lack of connection with the characters if there was a good plot, but really there wasn't much of one. There is a lot of blah blah blah talking, mostly about Ravens hard knock childhood and how Jonah needed to help her break out of it. There is a lot of talk about kids and probably the most significant relationship in this book is between Raven and a toddler her best friends kid. There was a lot of blah blah blah talk about how much she loved that kid and how she is such a great "auntie", not my favorite subject in my erotica. There is also a lot Raven's friends telling her about there is just so much more about her then a cold hearted bitch and she is such a wonderful person, blah blah blah. Usually Im a sucker for a emotionally scared character but there was nothing about Raven that could not bring me in to care. Even when she revealed a doozy of a hard knock that would usually have my heart breaking, nothing... Jonah is ok I guess, nothing special. He spends a lot of time thinking about Ravens bad childhood and how she is such a strong woman and how he wants to help, but we don't really get a good look into what makes him tick. In theory he should be a stand out character but he doesn't really stand out or shine. Since this is erotica I suppose I should talk about the steam factor in this book. Again, lack luster for me. It starts out promising but quickly tapers off to guess what?! A lot of talking about doing and not as much actual doing. So as it turns out Jonah is a Dom and somehow brings out Raven's until now non-existent sub qualities. Out of the bedroom Raven does not have a single sub trait she does not have a hard time making eye contact for any period of time, no eagerness to please, absolutely nothing that would signify a sub. I guess she is supposed to be like Nora from the Original Sinners series by Tiffany Reisz but she just does not have Nora's confidence, or swagger to pull it off. She is supposed to be bi and promiscuous and her bestie is married to men; however, when he thinks about her newly found sub tendencies she thinks of herself as a freak? Really because being Bi is so much less freaky?? Jonah is like a half assed Dom, I didn't buy it for a second. I just couldn't take him seriously as a Dom. I've read my share of BDSM and usually a Dom has a certain quality of them, a commanding presence that Jonah just did not have. The D/s portion of this book just read as an afterthought to me. Like the author randomly thought, oh this is erotica I better throw some sort of kink in there, let's just go with the old staple D/s.. easy peasy.. and the effect was EH.. Im sure lots of people will end up loving this book especially fans of this series, but for me it was just a boring miss...

*This book was provided thru NetGalley for an honest review. No other compensation was provided.