The Sight of You by Ashley Mack

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The September Smart Women Read Romance exclusive patreon review theme was the broad genre of contemporary. The Sight of You by Ashley Mack won the poll. This is not only the first book in her The Senses series, but also her debut novel! I was able to use this to cover the prompts Book Rec'd To You for Fall in Love and Sky Blue (airport in the story) for Color Me Romantic.

Alina is on vacation in Seattle. Whenever she's on vacay, she always plans for her last night to have one night stand. As the head of security for her father and their company (that has some less than legal dealings), she tends to keep to herself at home. She comes across Brody in a club and they feel an unexpected connection. After they spend a magical night together, he wakes up alone. Not too much later, Alina is prepping for her sister to meet her arranged marriage partner Derick. Their companies are hoping to both strengthen their respective portfolios as well as be able to protect each other as they withdraw form the shadier sides of business. When Derick arrives at their family home, they are both surprised to find out that Derick is Brody. He quickly changes the terms and says he'll only marry Alina. She agrees and they end up getting married within a couple days and she gets whisked back to Seattle. As she struggles to find a new role in her life, things start happening that threatens not only Derick's business, but him and Alina.

First off, this was fairly steamy. I was surprised how steamy this was and do have to say that as we got past the 60% mark, I did start to kind of skim those scenes. They were written well and definitely packed heat, but I was a little bit over them. Now, this book is not written perfectly and you can definitely tell that this is Ashely Mack's debut book. There are some questionable choices made both by the characters and in the plotting in general. However, I enjoyed this book and read it voraciously. There was something about Alina and Derick's characters that just really drew me into their story. I was able to set aside the odd choices and really immerse myself. I could not put it down and stayed up way too late the night I first picked it up (I got through ~85% in one sitting). I liked getting to see Alina really work through her new "societal wife" role and how to integrate her previous training into it. The way she came to really enjoy working on the board of a charity was really nice to see, but she still had that edge and didn't stop training and exercising her skills.

Now during the live chat I know that there were quite a few people that struggled with this book. If you are a reader that finds the writing style to be a big detriment to enjoyment of a book, definitely be cautious picking this up. I really enjoyed my time reading though and usually writing style isn't something that holds me back from enjoying a book. She also had a "their" POV. It was from narrator's position that pulled back to almost talk to reader about what was going on with Alina and Derick. I have to say, it was a little odd. It didn't bother me, but I wish it either wasn't there or was there more. I feel like it could've been a really cool twist to how the story was told but was implemented a little timidly. Part of me felt it was odd and wasn't quite sure, but the more it happened the more I started to enjoy it and ended up wanting to Ashely to really push the device more and just go for it.

Overall I really enjoyed this debut book and cannot wait to read more of the series. It looks like she's planning on doing novellas between the books for side characters, but the second book came out earlier this October and is one of Alina's sisters (the one that may or may not be a serial killer). I can't wait to read more from Ashley and join her in this writing journey. Always love finding a new author, even more so to jump on in the beginning! Definitely check this out if the premise is intriguing, but just remember this is a debut book and temper your expectations.

Have you read The Sight of You?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: The Sight of You, Ashley Mack, 4-stars, 1 day, eBook, 326 pages, published in 2022, indie published