Rating: 3.75 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novel
Dylan never felt like he had a place in the world and he never bonded with his adoptive parents. When Dylan was fourteen, he met 19-year-old Vincent online, which turned into an in-person meeting, which turned into Dylan being drugged and raped for three years by men that paid Vincent. Dylan has felt lost, even after the abuse ended. He doesn’t understand why his parents weren’t bothered he was gone for days at a time at such a young age, and no one really wants to know what Dylan suffered—not that Dylan wants to share every detail.
It’s thirteen years later, Dylan now lives with PTSD, and his mind is fractured and fragmented on a daily basis. He is in therapy and he is in a relationship, but Dylan doesn’t feel loyal to either one. He still craves the drugs and he still remembers more than he wants and he’s tired of the pain every day. The police investigation didn’t go anywhere and Dylan can’t forget. But now, a new law opens a one-year period, a lookback window, where Dylan can sue his abusers after the statute of limitations ran out. But Dylan doesn’t want money. Dylan wants vengeance and how Dylan emerges from the other side of that window will determine his future.
Clearly from the description, this is not an easy book. It was also not an easy book for me to get into at first, until I understood Dylan a little more. The book is told solely through Dylan’s POV and, in the first part of the book, the storyline feels fragmented and with fewer details because that is how Dylan’s mind is. He has extensive trauma, combined with years of drug use, and it’s a learning curve to be in Dylan’s head. Yet, I liked Dylan and wanted to see him reach a point where he could move forward and have a functional life. The new law was supposed to bring him some a way to get justice but even now it’s difficult to get someone to help him and Dylan is spiraling further every day.
He has a fiancé turned husband, but Dylan doesn’t follow conventional means and although he doesn’t set out to hurt those around him, he does, but to what extent we don’t know, as we don’t get their thoughts at all. The book pulls us in and out of Dylan’s thoughts and, at times, it reads like a stream of consciousness and, at other times, we get a few more solid details. There are times when Dylan is in an out of the moment and then times where he was looking back from a later date and sometimes the flow was more disruptive than lyrical.
I would have liked to know about how Dylan got himself in the situation he was in as a teen, as more on that would have held the story together for me a little more. This is not a romance book and there is no magic fix for Dylan at the end, but he does make changes toward a better tomorrow. The book ends on the same style of the breeze it blew in on. There is no true peace for Dylan and no grand happy ending and it blends into the abstract. Dylan’s story is an important one and I was satisfied I had the opportunity to meet him.
