Marked By Books: Touching Melody Blog Tour: Review & GIVEAWAY!!!

I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaaack! I've finally returned from my web-less venture, and I'm so glad to be back! I hope you guys liked Maia because I think she's absolutely wonderful. She's never done anything like this before, and I personally believe that she did a fantastic job. Let's give her a round of applause!

And now, without further ado, onto Touching Melody.

Touching Melody by RaShelle Workman

Maddie Martin's first weekend at college is nothing like she's used to. It's wild, like the wilderness on which the University of Bellam Springs sits. Roped into going to a frat party, she literally runs into Kyle Hadley. The boy she's loved since she was nine. The boy she promised all of her firsts to. But that was before his father killed her parents.

Determined to stay away from him, she throws herself into her music. Practicing piano eases her heavy heart, calms the sadness, and pushes away images of Kyle's face.

Until it doesn't.

Her music professor asks her to play a duet for their annual Graduation Gala. Doing so means she'll be assured another full ride scholarship. It's an opportunity she can't pass up.

But Kyle is the other half of the duet. And that means hours and hours of practicing.

Days and months of seclusion - just the two of them. And it's more than just music. It's passion like Maddie never believed was possible.

The inevitable happens. She falls in love with him all over again. But, will loving him be enough to erase all the hate in her heart for his father? Can she look at him, and not see the evil in his family tree?

And maybe it's all a set up. Maybe Kyle is only pretending to care so he can finish what his father started, and kill her too.

Amazon

RaShelle Workman is the bestselling author of the Dead Roses series ("Sleeping Roses" is being translated into Turkish, and will be available in print wherever Turkish books are sold in 2014), the Immortal Essence series, and the Blood and Snow series. She's sold over two hundred thousand copies of her novels worldwide in the past year, including Japan, Canada, and Europe.

Website Goodreads Facebook Twitter

Touching Melody was such a sweet book. Not a cloying kind of artificial sweet like children's cold medicine, but a rich and thought provoking sweet that has actual depth. Like a brownie - with nuts. There were parts that were so romantic that I thought I might melt into a puddle, but there were also many more important issues that RaShelle Workman brought up. Things like rape, drug abuse, and alcohol addiction don't go away just because you pretend they're not there, especially not in college. I think that RaShelle did an excellent job of staring these in the face without fear, and that was one of the most impressive things about this novel in my opinion. Here's an example:

"When teachers prepare you for college, they never mention the dark underbelly.

They talk about the classes, finding a major, living on your own, socializing with peers your own age, and getting a degree. They don't say anything about the parties, the drinking, and the drugs. They leave out the boys and the way our bodies thrum for more than books, studying, and tests. They don't tell us what happens at night, when class ends and real life begins.

That's where the authentic learning takes place. The difficult decisions that affect the rest of your life.

The real teacher - when the sun no longer hangs in the sky and the moon glistens against a blanket of darkness."

Neither Kyle nor Maddie were strangers to any of this, and they had both been dealt more than their fair share of pain. They tended to deal with that pain in very different ways at first, but the further I went along, the more similarities I saw between them.

The dual perspective writing really helped with this. This was the perfect story to be told from both of their points of view because they were on completely different pages for most of the novel. Neither of them usually had any clue what was going on in the other's head, and there wouldn't have been a very easy way to explain that to the reader. My favorite of the two to hear from was probably Kyle, so I am a little disappointed that there were only a handful of scenes from his perspective. I understand that Maddie was more of the protagonist than he was, but it still seemed like the balance was tipped over a little too far in her favor.

The only other complaint that I have for this amazing book is that some things seemed a little unresolved. There is absolutely no denying that the main issues - Mr. and Mrs. Martin's death, the Hadley family's involvement, Maddie's grief, and Kyle's abandonment - were completely taken care of, but there was one thing in particular that I believe should have had more attention paid to: Gina. She obviously had some serious stuff going on in her life, and a lot of it was only hinted at. None of it was really taken care of, and there's a lot of stuff that I still wonder about with her. She was a fabulous secondary character, a beautifully flawed friend for Maddie, and an incredible asset to this already amazing story, so I believe that she deserves to be attended to as such.