Lost & FoundSeries: Lost & Found #1
Publication date: May 7th 2013
Rating: ★★★★☆
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There’s complicated. And there’s Rowen Sterling.
After numbing pain for the past five years with boys, alcohol, and all-around apathy, she finds herself on a Greyhound bus to nowhere Montana the summer after she graduates high school. Her mom agreed to front the bill to Rowen’s dream art school only if Rowen proves she can work hard and stay out of trouble at Willow Springs Ranch. Cooking breakfast at the crack of dawn for a couple dozen ranch hands and mucking out horse stalls are the last things in the world Rowen wants to spend her summer doing.
Until Jesse Walker saunters into her life wearing a pair of painted-on jeans, a cowboy hat, and a grin that makes something in her chest she’d thought was frozen go boom-boom. Jesse’s like no one else, and certainly nothing like her. He’s the bright and shiny to her dark and jaded.
Rowen knows there’s no happily-ever-after for the golden boy and the rebel girl—happily-right-now is a stretch—so she tries to forget and ignore the boy who makes her feel things she’s not sure she’s ready to feel. But the more she pushes him away, the closer he seems to get. The more she convinces herself she doesn’t care, the harder she falls.
When her dark secrets refuse to stay locked behind the walls she’s kept up for years, Rowen realizes it’s not just everyone else she needs to be honest with. It’s herself.Rowen has been spiraling down the road of self-destruction for the past five years in an attempt to numb the pain her distant mother has caused her. She hides behind her dark clothes, boys, alcohol, and an attitude that makes it hard for people to want to be closed to her. But for Rowen, that's kind of the point.
She's shipped off to spend the summer helping out at her mother's friend's ranch, where she meets the gorgeous cowboy Jesse Walker and his super tight jeans. Only Jesse doesn't seem that scared of her when they meet, which is certainly new for Rowen who's used to people giving her side-way glances and calling her a freak behind her back.
While in the ranch Rowen learns what is like to have people show genuine affection and concern towards her without expecting anything in return, that mother's don't always know best, and that sometimes you have more in common with the people you never thought you would than your own family.
Lost & Found's plot is not original. The entire bad-girl gets shipped off to a ranch in the middle of nowhere by her mother and meets and falls in love with the owner's son isn't something we haven't seen before, but Nicole Williams still managed to turn it into an entertaining story.
I had a blast reading about Rowen's interactions with Jesse and the easy way they bickered and tease each other. Especially when she tries her best to get Jesse to stay away from her by being overly sarcastic and rude, and all he does is smile at her and offer a witty comment right back.
The only thing that bothered me was Rowen's fear of letting people get close to her, and when they did, push them away. That aspect made for some pretty predictable situations throughout the story where I just knew she was going to do or say something mean and mess up the good things she had going for her.
It was still a really sweet story about life's ups and downs and learning to accept yourself for who you really are, and it only served to cement my undying love for anything written by Nicole Williams.
