REVIEW: Playing Patience By Tabatha Vargo

July 18, 2013 Julie Uncategorized 2

Playing Patience

By Tabatha Vargo

(The Blow Hole Boys)

New Adult Contemporary Romance

ABOUT THE BOOK

Sometimes all you need is Patience.

Life’s been hard for Zeke. Being a punching bag for his alcoholic father has turned him into stone. Not even the dodgy trailer park he lives in can scare him. Fighting is his release and sex, drugs, and his guitar bring him peace, but deep down Zeke isn’t quite as hard as he makes himself out to be. When he meets Patience, she finds all his broken pieces and puts him back together, but she’s a ray of light in his shadowed life and the last thing he wants to do is bring her into his dark world. Playing careless is easy, playing the bad guy can be fun, but playing Patience is impossible, especially when she can see right through him.

Zeke isn’t the only one who’s broken, and for the first time, in a long time, Patience feels alive. Her black and white world gets a shot of color when she meets Zeke. He’s unlike anyone she’s ever met with his tattoos, piercings, and blunt honesty. She wants nothing more than to let go and ride the wild side with him, but some wounds never heal and the broken pieces of Patience aren’t so easy to find.

***Warning: this book contains graphic language, sex, rape, and violence. Mature readers only. Not intended for young adult readers.***

REVIEW

Playing Patience has more than just a little bit of everything, it has a LOT of everything. A lot of bad boy, a lot of angst, a lot of sad, wounded girl, a lot of drugs, and rock-n-roll, and drinking, and sex, and abuse, and whew… that’s a lot.

But it totally works and I think it’s because the characters are so well developed. I loved Zeke, he is damaged and nasty, yet soft and sweet when required, just like a good book boyfriend! Yes, he’s got some issues – for one, he deals drugs. So – yeah. Strike out for that. But when you get to know him, you see he’s just a guy trying to get by. He needs the money. It’s not an excuse, he wants to stop dealing, but it’s difficult to just give up your only source of income.

Second, he’s a guitar god. Yes, Zeke is in a band.

Patience is damaged with a capital D. I’m not sure how Patience even goes on living, she’s that broken. But she’s a trooper and she pushes on, trying to do the right thing and failing an awful lot. I liked that about Patience. On the outside Patience looks like a privileged princess, but on the inside she’s a hot mess. And she has lots of reasons to be.

So the plot starts out as your basic angry bad boy meets broken girl… but that’s where the trope ends as far as I’m concerned. Playing Patience has so many little details that makes it real that you forget that this plot has been done over and over again. But she’s a tough cookie this one. She’s no pushover for hot and saucy Zeke…

“Out of nowhere I reared my hand back and slapped him across the face. It felt good to let my anger out. Had I known it would feel that good to hit someone, I would’ve gone around beating the crap out of everyone.”

Of course, the best part of this story is the angst between Patience, who is just trying to help Zeke out when she announces he’s got drugs in his pocket to the cops as they are getting arrested (no really, this was her helping!) and Zeke, who’s trying to talk himself into not wanting Patience in the least, even though she’s practically killing him every time they meet.

“I was starting to think she was a gift from the devil himself. She was a pretty box of temptation wrapped in a force field of police officers waiting to arrest me, or a box of sweets with a big-ass invisible mousetrap sitting on the cover.”

And oh yes, Zeke only gets better from there…

“Nothing that comes out of my mouth is fun? I resent those words. My tongue comes out of my mouth and I’ve been told multiple times that it’s fun.”

Playing runs the gamut of emotions – from happy, to sad, to disgusted, to shocked, to anger, to satisfaction. That’s what you get in the end. It’s satisfying and that’s why it’s so freaking popular!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tabatha’s been writing since she could pick up a pencil. Her first publication was a little poem in her elementary school paper, from that point on she was hooked. When she was a teenager, she traded in her girly magazines for personalized writing notebooks.

At nineteen, she met her own personal prince charming and writing took a back burner for a while. She’s now married to that prince and the mother of a beautiful seven-year-old princess/rock star. Once her daughter was born, writing came back into her life, and she finished her very first novel, Wicked Fate, in May of 2009.

She’s now pursuing her English degree and she hopes to one day teach while continuing to write.