Title: Loving Mr. Daniels
Pages: 310
Genre: Romance, New Adult
Publisher: BCherry Books Publishing
Date published: May 10, 2014
Format: Kindle e-book
Source: Amazon
Synopsis:
To Whom it May Concern,
It was easy to call us forbidden and harder to call us soulmates. Yet I believed we were both. Forbidden soulmates.
When I arrived to Edgewood, Wisconsin I didn’t plan to find him. I didn't plan to stumble into Joe's bar and have Daniel's music stir up my emotions. I had no clue that his voice would make my hurts forget their own sorrow. I had no idea that my happiness would remember its own bliss.
When I started senior year at my new school, I wasn’t prepared to call him Mr. Daniels, but sometimes life happens at the wrong time for all the right reasons.
Our love story wasn’t only about the physical connection.
It was about family. It was about loss. It was about being alive. It was silly. It was painful. It was mourning. It was laughter.
It was ours.
And for those reasons alone, I would never apologize for loving Mr. Daniels.
-Ashlyn Jennings
Review
The basis of this story pulled at my heartstrings because it starts around the strong bond between two sisters. Just reading about them made me appreciate my own sister a little more. While it's not the main plot, it remains as one of the more memorable parts because it is laced into the entire story.
The cover and title of the story made me suspicious to what this story could be about. The synopsis was certainly another clue. The story itself confirmed my suspicions. I'm not one to read about student/teacher relationships because I don't approve of them; they tend to go against my own beliefs. But, I couldn't help but like this story because 1) the characters are only a couple years apart in age and 2) it's clearly a love story, not a lust story. Those are the only 2 things that stopped me from putting the story down and casting it away to the dark corner where "Did-Not-Finish" books go to die.
I liked Daniel. He seems to be an upstanding kind of guy who wants always strives to do the right thing, even if it's something that hurts him emotionally and makes him unhappy. He's practically perfect, and sometimes that made him a little boring to read about. But for the most part, I liked him and kind of wish I could find a guy like him. As for Ashlyn, well, I can say with certainty I connected with her and definitely liked her as a character. She has doubts about who she matters to and we see her get bullied for something she cannot change or control. Those are general issues that I can understand and I was hoping things would work out for her.
I'm sad that we only get to know Gabby through letters. I think had she been a character in the story outside of those letters, we would have gotten to know a different Ashlyn than the one we read about.
This story had its moments--moments where I cried with Ashlyn, moments where I was rooting for her and Daniel, and moments where I thought Daniel deserved to get punched in the face. Hey, if I was a parent and found out a teacher was in a relationship with my kid, hells yeah I'd punch him/her.
There were some really cheesy moments where I just had to shut my eyes and then carry on, but I did like this story. That's why it gets 3.5 Platypires from me.