Jet by Jay Crownover Series: Marked Men #2
Series Rating:
Published by William Morrow Paperbacks on May 28th 2013
Genres: Contemporary, New Adult, Romance
Pages: 416
Format: eBook
Source: Purchased
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With his tight leather pants and a sharp edge that makes him dangerous, Jet Keller is every girl’s rock and roll fantasy. But Ayden Cross is done walking on the wild side with bad boys. She doesn’t want to give in to the heat she sees in Jet’s dark, haunted eyes. She’s afraid of getting burned from the sparks of their spontaneous combustion, even as his touch sets her on fire.
Jet can’t resist the Southern Belle with mile-long legs in cowboy boots who defies his every expectation. Yet the closer he feels to Ayden, the less he seems to know her. While he’s tempted to get under her skin and undo her in every way, he knows firsthand what happens to two people with very different ideas about relationships.
Will the blaze burn into an enduring love. . . or will it consume their dreams and turn them to ashes?
So. Jet and Ayden. One of the issues I struggle with when reading NA is remembering how it was at that age. I’m not exactly an old crone, but I’m pretty far removed from this age group. Sometimes some of the angst and drama can be hard to take. But I do remember it. Everything was so heightened. Everything was so important, even, and maybe especially, the things that, looking back, I realize weren’t really all that important. We ate angst for breakfast and followed it with a side dish of drama. That’s what being that age is all about.
But that heightening of everything, that all-or-nothing way of looking at the world is also why I prefer Happy For Now endings in NA, more than Happily Ever After. Everyone is just so young. And, yes, I’m sure we all know couples who met in high school or college and got married before they could even drink legally and lived happily ever after. I know that. But we all know those couples enough to remark on it because it’s so rare that it works out that way. Be together by the end of the book, sure. Be talking about marriage or even engaged. But to actually get married so young rubs me the wrong way. At least get through college. You are not going to be the same person at thirty that you were in college. If you are, you’re doing something wrong. You won’t be the same at forty that you were at thirty, either, but the difference is a lot less dramatic from 30-40 than it is from 20-30. I didn’t get married until I was in my thirties. I’m not saying everyone needs to wait that long, but at least wait until you’re a little further along in your owning yourself.
All that said, I realize that Ayden and Jet had more than just your typical college problems. These two had real problems in their pasts and presents that made them grow up faster than their peers. Not enough to negate what I said. All you have to do is see Ayden’s reaction to the break-in at Jets’s studio to see that. Jet is at the lowest we’ve seen him in this book, and all she can think about is herself. She cloaks it in “I’m doing this for him”, but it didn’t make any sense. View Spoiler »
And the reactions of their friends didn’t really make a lot of sense to me. Given what I said in that spoiler above, it made no sense to me that everyone would be telling Jet to get it together and go after Ayden. Shaw tried to talk some sense into Ayden initially, but then she calls Jet, while he’s on tour in Germany and tells him that if he doesn’t fly back to Kentucky right then to sit with Ayden, he doesn’t deserve her. What kind of horseshit is that? The man is on tour, a huge tour that his band worked hard for, and he’s supposed to fly back to Kentucky at a moment’s notice to sit with a girl who has made it clear she doesn’t want him?
There’s a lot of love out there for this series, and I liked the first one enough to move on with it, but I hope it’s a little better than this one. I liked Jet, I’m glad he got what he wanted, Ayden had a lot of growing up to do before she settled in.
About Jay Crownover
Jay Crownover is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Marked Men series. She also introduced the dark and sexy world of The Point that started with BETTER WHEN HE’s BAD and is currently working on her newest series The Saints of Denver. Like her characters, she is a big fan of tattoos. She loves music and wishes she could be a rock star, but since she has no aptitude for singing or instrument playing, she’ll settle for writing stories with interesting characters that make the reader feel something. She lives in Colorado with her three dogs.
