Since
I really enjoyed the first book in Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series (Bared to
You) and my review of the book appears to have been very popular with
people, I decided to read and review the second book in the series, Reflected in You. Unfortunately, I have
to say that while I did enjoy this book, I found it to be a pretty disappointing
follow-up to Bared to You.
Right
off the bat, my biggest problem with Reflected
in You is that while I couldn’t help but root for Eva and Gideon’s
relationship to work in Bared to You,
this book really made me question whether or not their relationship was one
that was worth rooting for. The story itself picks up almost immediately where Bared to You, which is something that I
really liked about this book. Eva and Gideon are still very happy together, and
Cary is dealing with the aftermath of Eva and Gideon walking in on his orgy.
However,
that happiness seemed to end pretty suddenly and fairly early on in the book,
and things just took a pretty angst-ridden and dramatic turn for Eva and
Gideon’s relationship for essentially the rest of the book. While I usually
think that having plenty of drama in a story is good thing when it comes to
writing a relationship for a TV show or in this case, a book series, because it
keeps things interesting; this book was so full of angst and drama that it
honestly left me questioning whether or not I should be rooting for Eva and
Gideon’s relationship to work out.
That
being said, I’m really glad Eva and Gideon are both people who recognize that
they have some major emotional baggage and issues, and that they are at least
trying to deal with those issues instead of being completely blind and in total
denial about their problems, both as a couple and as individuals. While they
both see Dr. Petersen individually, I have to question how seriously they were
taking couple’s therapy. After all, despite the fact that Dr. Petersen suggests
that the role that sex plays in their relationship, mainly when they’re having
some kind of argument, is doing more harm to their relationship than good; that
didn’t even prompt them to consider that maybe they should take a break from
having sex with each other.
It
wasn’t until after they had broken up as far as Eva was concerned that she
realized that taking a break from their relationship had been a good thing for
her personally. However, I really have to question how seriously Gideon was
taking therapy since he apparently didn’t show up for several of his
appointments with Dr. Petersen. Sure, I suppose Gideon unexpectedly bailing on
his sessions with Dr. Petersen could have possibly been a calculated move on his
part when it came to his plan to kill Nathan, which involved making it look
like he had broken up with Eva and gotten back together with his ex, Corrine,
but I still have my doubts about how seriously Gideon was taking therapy. I’m
really hoping that Sylvia Day will touch upon this in the third book in Crossfire series (Entwined in You).
While
this book really frustrated me at times, one thing that I have to give Sylvia
Day a lot of praise for is that this book definitely wasn’t predictable at all.
Much like l did when I was reading Bared
to You, there were a lot things that I had found myself thinking would
happen in this book, that either didn’t happen or things played out in a way
that was completely different from what I had originally predicted. One example
of this would be the fact that fairly early on in the book there’s a weird
moment where Eva sees something that kind of startles her while she’s having
lunch with some friends. When I read that part of the book, I immediately
guessed that she had seen her former stepbrother, Nathan Barker, who had
repeatedly raped her for several years when she was younger. However, I figured
that Nathan was going to show up towards the end of the book and try to either
rape her again or try to kill her, only to get killed in the process. That of
course didn’t happen.
One
thing that I should probably mention is that much like I did when I was reading
Bared to You, I couldn’t help but
compare and contrast this book to Fifty
Shades of Grey. For the record, I was mainly thinking about how much more I
like both this book and the characters in the Crossfire series compared to how I feel about the Fifty Shades books and the characters in
that series.
Personally,
I think that Eva continues to be a really great and likable protagonist,
especially if you compare her to Ana Steele from the Fifty Shades trilogy. Eva is smart, she’s a good friend to Cary and
her coworkers, and she’s also strong-willed and independent. I also really like
that Sylvia Day didn’t have Eva’s life revolve solely around Gideon in terms of
what she did with her time or simply what she spent her time thinking about as
soon as she met Gideon in Bared to You.
The fact that Ana’s entire life and pretty much all of her thoughts revolve
around Christian once she meets him is one of the many things that makes her
such an annoying and unlikable character, if you ask me.
While
I definitely still like Gideon Cross more than I like Christian Grey, I’d
definitely be lying if I said that Gideon didn’t frustrate the hell out of me
and really creep me out at times in this book. The good thing is that I was at
least able to still care about Gideon as I was reading this book. However,
Gideon wasn’t the only one who frustrated me in this book, Eva annoyed me at one
point in the book too, which is something that I’ll talk about later on in this
review.
While
I really like Gideon for the most part, I’ve definitely had very conflicting
feelings about Gideon and his behavior at times in both Bared to You and this book. On the one hand, I can definitely
understand and relate to Gideon having a hard time letting his guard down with
Eva and letting her in emotionally. It has definitely been really hard for me
to let my guard down with people and truly let people in emotionally over the
years too. There are only a few people that I’ve been able to really be myself
with and who I’d say have really seen me for who I truly am. That being said, I
do think that it’s pretty unfair of Gideon to be so insistent that Eva trust
him when he himself wouldn’t tell Eva what happened to him as a child and what
has been the cause of the nightmares that he’s had in both Bared to You and in this book that have put Eva in danger on
several occasions. I just think that if he’s going to refuse to completely open
up to Eva, he should probably be more understanding of Eva having her own trust
issues instead of asking Eva for more than he’s willing to give her in return
when it comes to their relationship.
While
Gideon has yet to truly creep me out as much as Christian does with his
behavior in the Fifty Shades books,
Gideon definitely came close to reaching the same level of creepiness that
Christian constantly exhibited throughout the Fifty Shades trilogy and in Grey
at one point in this book. He and Eva went to a concert, and the lead singer of
the band was a guy named Brett, who Eva used to hook up with when she was going
through a self-destructive phase. Things took a really awkward and
uncomfortable turn when the band performed a song that Brett had written about
Eva and how he still missed her. Eva ended up kissing Brett when they were
talking to each other after the concert. Gideon saw them kissing and really
lost it. Eva proceeded to insist that she give Gideon a blow job to “wash away
the kiss”, which she did, and Gideon followed up on Eva giving him a blow job
by demanding that they have sex repeatedly.
That
was definitely the most awkward and uncomfortable scene to read in the entire
book. To me, it was the equivalent of the part of both Fifty Shades of Grey and Grey
where Christian hits Ana with a belt six times and makes her count each blow of
the belt out loud along with him. What made it really uncomfortable for me was
the fact that Sylvia Day established that there was a part of Eva that wanted
to use their safe word (Crossfire) to put an end to the whole thing. However,
Eva felt like she couldn’t do that if she wanted to prove to Gideon how much
she loved him.
The
key difference between the two scenes for me is that I genuinely care about Eva
as a character, so I felt really, really bad for her that Gideon wanted to have
sex with her repeatedly when she didn’t really want to. On the other hand, when
it comes to how I feel about the whole scene where Christian hits Ana with a
belt six times, I personally can’t stand Ana and I can’t in good conscious root
for Ana and Christian’s relationship, so I don’t care about what’s happening to
Ana in that moment as much I do when it comes to how I felt about the
aforementioned scene in Reflected in You.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a part of me that does care about Ana and feel
sorry for her at that particular moment in both Fifty Shades of Grey and Grey.
However, what I feel when I’m reading that part is simply basic human compassion,
because I’m not a heartless bastard.
Aside
from feeling a major sense of discomfort and awkwardness as I was reading that
particular part of Reflected in You,
I also couldn’t help but wonder how it was possible for Gideon to apparently
have no refractory period whatsoever and for him to be able to repeatedly have
sex with Eva with no breaks in between each time that they had sex. As a guy,
that just seemed rather unrealistic to me, but I’m guessing that the reader is
supposed to suspend their disbelief and just assume that Gideon doesn’t have
any kind of refractory period when it comes to sex.
It
was revealed that when Gideon was child, a psychiatric resident who happened to
be the brother-in-law of his pediatrician, Dr. Lucas, apparently raped him. However,
when his mother took him to the doctor, Dr. Lucas lied and told his mother that
there wasn’t any evidence of sexual abuse, leading his mother to believe that
Gideon had lied about being raped. Despite the fact that I know the reason
behind a lot of Gideon’s odd behavior in both Bared to You and this book, as well as some of truth behind the
sexual abuse that he suffered as a child now that I’ve finished reading Reflected in You, I’m honestly still
feeling somewhat dissatisfied by the reveal of what happened to Gideon when he
was a child.
On
the one hand, I love the fact that the truth was at least kind of revealed in a
way that was completely different from the way that I was expecting it to be
revealed. While I think that it really shows Eva’s ability to be assertive and
stand up to people, I do think she was also kind of out line for going behind
Gideon’s back and confronting Gideon’s mother the way she did. After all, she
didn’t really know the truth about what had happened to Gideon when he was a
child; she was basically taking a stab in the dark with what she said. Eva’s
definitely a very smart and compassionate person, but that doesn’t mean she
still couldn’t have been completely off the mark and come across as an
emotionally oblivious idiot when she confronted his mother if she had been
wrong about what had happened to Gideon when he was a child.
The
other reason Eva doing that kind of bugged me was because I feel like she completely
violated Gideon’s privacy and trust by doing that. It really bugs me when
somebody confronts someone else about something that’s a very personal part of
my life without telling me that they’re going to do that first or at least
after the fact; people doing that kind of thing on my behalf typically upsets
me more than it helps me. In most cases, I don’t think anybody should confront
someone behind another person’s back about a personal matter without telling
them about it. However, the thing that bothers me the most about the way that
whole reveal was handled in the book is the fact that there wasn’t any kind of follow-up
or conversation between Eva and Gideon at the end of the book where they talk
to each other about what happened to Gideon when he was a child.
That
brings me to the other major problem that I have with the ending of the book.
The conversation between Eva and Gideon about how Gideon killed Nathan and
managed to do it in such a way that he was able to get away with it really came
across to me as being rather…icky. After all, she essentially thanked him for
murdering Nathan, and it’s established to the reader that she thinks of Gideon
murdering Nathan as a gift. This exchange also led to Gideon telling Eva that
he loves her for the first time. I know that the female police officer that
talked to Eva and told her that they were closing the investigation of Nathan’s
murder said that if Gideon hadn’t killed Nathan, he probably would have
eventually managed to kill her, but murder is still murder. If the events that
happened in the book played out in a way where Nathan had come to try and kill
Eva or attack her, and Gideon killed Nathan as he was trying to kill Eva, therefore
saving her life, I might not be so disturbed by Eva thanking him for killing
Nathan. Regardless, I just feel like Sylvia Day’s choice of words at the end of
the book was incredibly irksome.
All
things considered, while Reflected in You
is definitely a decent follow-up to Bared
to You, I still think that this book as a whole is rather disappointing. If
I had to say what I think this book’s biggest flaw is, it would definitely be
that I spent most of the book questioning whether or not I should actually be
rooting for Eva and Gideon’s relationship to work out, which I think is a
gigantic no no when it comes to a story that’s supposed to be romantic. The
story itself seemed to be overwhelmed with angst and rather lacking in happy
and genuinely romantic moments between Eva and Gideon.
While
I definitely think that it’s important for a book series like this one to have
plenty of drama and angst to keep things interesting, I also think that it’s
very important for a story to include a decent amount of happy and genuinely
romantic moments between the main couple in the story. Personally, I think doing
that helps the dramatic parts of the story to have more of an impact on the
reader. On a more positive note, I definitely have to give Sylvia Day a lot of
credit for not having the story end up being very predictable though. I was
pretty surprised by how things played out by the end of the book. Despite the
fact that I found this book to be rather disappointing, I’m still really looking
forward to reading the third book in the Crossfire
series, Entwined in You, at some
point in the future.
That
being said, my final score for Reflected
in You is 5 out of 10.
