Secret Lucidity by E.K. Blair

🌟🌟🌟 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

This wasn’t supposed to happen. 

But it did.

This wasn’t supposed to be my life. 

But it was.

I was just a typical girl, living a typical life. Nothing was out of the ordinary until tragedy threw me into a turnstile I couldn’t see my way out of. That was, until him.

I never could’ve imagined my heart falling the way it did. Hard, fast, and with unbounding beauty. 

The only problem? 

He was off limits. 

Forbidden. 

But he became my everything, and I became his, so we risked it all. It was only a matter of time until I realized that our risk came with unimaginable consequences. 

My name is Camellia Hale and his is David Andrews, and this is our love story. 

I thought that Secret Lucidity was a difficult book to review because if the romance would have been thrown out then I would have loved it. Since this is a romance novel I feel like I need to explain myself. This book had a solid beginning where I got a taste for who some of the characters were as people and established the relationships between them. After that, I began to have a huge problem with this book. I realize that it is a forbidden romance but I didn't find the romance believable. It came off more as creepy manipulation than a deep, meaningful, love between two people. The relationship between them wasn't built on any kind of foundation before they are each professing their love to one another. David is pretty much saying that it was love at first sight and before you know it Cam is saying that she can't stand to be away from him or becomes severely depressed. Does that sound healthy to you?

The aspect of this book that saved it for me was the grief that Cam goes through because of what happens at the beginning of the book. I thought that the author does a good job of portraying depression and how far down that rabbit hole a person can fall. This book deals with sensitive subject matter like self harm and how people handle loss differently. I thought that the relationships between Cam /her mother and Cam/friends created an interesting dynamic in the book that showed how she was changing throughout the book and what she felt that she needed from each of them. I also liked how the author dealt with how those around a person give them a timeline for their grief when there is not a definitive timeline for coping with the loss of someone you love.