Review: If You Stay by Courtney Cole

If You Stay
Courtney Cole
Series: Beautifully Broken #1
Publication date: February 5th 2013 by Lakehouse Press
Rating: ★★☆☆☆

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24-year old Pax Tate is an asshole. 
Seriously. 

He’s a tattooed, rock-hard bad-boy with a bad attitude to match. 

But he’s got his reasons. 

His mother died when Pax was seven, leaving a hole in his heart filled with guilt although he doesn’t understand why. What he does know is that he and his dad are left alone and with more issues than they can count. 

As Pax grew up, he tried to be the kid his father always wanted; the perfect golden boy, but it didn’t work. His dad couldn’t overcome his grief long enough to notice and Pax couldn’t keep up the impossible perfect façade. 
So he slipped far, far from it. 

Now, he uses drugs and women to cope with the ugliness, the black void that he doesn’t want to deal with. If he pretends that the emptiness isn’t there, then it isn’t, right? 
Wrong. 

And it’s never more apparent than when he meets Mila. 
Sweet, beautiful Mila Hill is the fresh air to his hardened frown, the beauty to his ugly heart. He doesn’t know how to not hurt her, but he quickly realizes that he’s got to figure it out because he needs her to breathe.

When memories of his mother’s death resurface from where he’s repressed them for so long, Mila is there to catch him when the guilt starts making sense. Mila is the one…the one who can save him from his broken troubled heart; from his issues, from the emptiness. 

But only if he can stop being an asshole long enough to allow it. 

He knows that. And he’s working on it. 

But is that enough to make her stay?

Another one of those books that had me super excited to read it, only for the plot to fall flat and disappoint me.

The first paragraph was great. It made me want to stand up and clap and congratulate the author on such a start for her story, because it was just that good. It really gives you an insight as to who Pax is as a person and of how much he does not care about anything other than block himself out.

Pax is your standard asshole with a mysterious past and a serious drug problem while Mila is the naive good girl who wants to save him from himself. They're relationship is rocky from the start, Pax trying to get himself back together and dealing with his drug problem, and Mila wanting to forget about the bad boy she saved and who makes her feel like she never has before.

The book is told from dual POV, and that's where the problem starts. It just feels like whenever the change from Pax's POV to Mila's happens, the entire story just goes downhill. Pax's character was much more developed than Mila's, with us reading about how he deals with what happened in his past and coming to terms with the truth he kept buried for so long.

And Mila...

I didn't agree with most of the decisions she made along the way, and with how she often she made every bad situation about what she was feeling and how it affected her. I guess I just couldn't relate to her in this story, and that was what made me dislike this book as much as I did.