Book: Taking The Reins by Katrina Abbott

Published January 2014 by Over The Cliff Publishing|154 Pages

Where I Got It: I own the e-book

Series: The Rosewoods #1

Genre: YA Contemporary

 

Brooklyn Prescott (if that’s even her real name) is the new girl at The Rosewood Academy for Academic Excellence, now that she’s moved back to the States after two years living in London. Rosewood, a boarding school for children of the rich and famous and known for its celebutantes, is missing just one element important to any junior’s education: boys. But luckily for Brooklyn, and the rest of the Rosewood girls, there’s a boys’ boarding school, The Westwood Academy, just a few miles away.

On her very first day, Brooklyn meets Will, a gorgeous and flirty boy on campus to help with move in. But is he who she thinks he is? And what about Brady, the cute stable boy? Or Jared, the former child actor with his grown-up good looks who can always make her laugh? As Brooklyn settles in at Rosewood, she’s faced with new friends, new challenges and new opportunities to make herself into the girl she always wanted to be. Whoever that might be.

Taking The Reins is the first installment of The Rosewoods, an exciting new Young Adult series for readers who love fun, flirty love stories.

I’m not sure how I feel about Taking The Reins!  I felt like it ended very abruptly.  Actually (and I really hate to say this) but I felt like I got an installment or an excerpt of a story- it felt very incomplete and unfinished.  I know the other books in the series will continue the story, but I felt like I didn’t get enough of the story or the characters to know if I even want to keep going with the series.  I was expecting a more complete story going into this book, and I feel like I got the beginnings of one instead.

I’m not even really sure what else I can say about Taking The Reins.  It’s really short (slightly over 150 pages on my Nook), and that made it hard to get into- there easily could have been more to the story, and I feel pretty underwhelmed by it.  Nothing stands out, even though (at the time that I’m writing this review), I finished it a couple of days ago.  There just wasn’t enough of a story to get my attention, but I’m also not a fan of reading a book in installments, and I feel like I’ll be getting that with this series, if Taking The Reins is any indication.  I know it’s unfair to judge an entire series on one book, but at the same time, there just wasn’t anything that made me want to keep reading.  If I do continue (and I’m not sure if I want to), then I’ll probably read the entire series at once, so I won’t feel like I’m reading a story in installments (or if I do feel that way, I probably won’t feel that way as much as I would have if I didn’t read them all at once).

2 stars.  It’s too short for me to get a good feel for the story, the characters, and where everything is headed.