'A Broken Past' by Cara L. Silver

★★

First of all...

...please get a professional cover made. I nearly by-passed this because the cover is really bad. 

​I didn't get how the puzzle pieces were related to a "broken life", yet they appear on the cover and at the head of each chapter. Second, have someone read your work. It lacks depth and maturity, which takes a potentially good read and makes it difficult to enjoy.

The characters are shallow, Dani -- while I can empathize with her painful past -- is amazingly immature. Camden isn't any better as his introduction to us readers is in placing a bet with a friend over Dani and then cyber-stalking her. For people attending USC, who are supposed to be super smart, they sure do behave rather questionably.

I will give the author credit for one thing -- writing a novel in the 1st person is very hard to do (not easy to read, either) and very hard to maintain. The author did well in this case.
​
The dialogue, while realistic at times, is also abrupt a lot of the times also. The author will start a conversation between her characters and before anything is answered or revealed, she moves on. It's as if she doesn't want the reader to get to know them too much or they may realize there isn't anything more to them than just words on a page. That isn't how a reader is supposed to feel. How can we sympathize with a character is we don't get to truly know them. For example:
      Dani is in Cam's room for the first time and thinks that she doesn't really know him and can't figure him out (we're 2/3 of the way through the book at this point and I can't figure them out either).
      He asks her what she's thinking. She tells him she can't figure him out. He says, "...if you want to know something; just ask." Instead of taking the opportunity to fill us in more on her characters, Dani just say, "I'm going to take you up on that. Right now, I just have one question. What's with the huge computer?"[Really? Wow]. He very briefly explains and then that's it--they're headed back to university.
     When she finally gets around to explaining to Cam why she's so broken, I wanted to weep -- not because the reason was so devastating, it was because it was so stupid and I felt as if I had just wasted several hours of my life trying to find a reason to keep reading this book.

I didn't finish it after that. It was a complete letdown.