Trust Fund by Skye Warren

I must warn you up front - that cover, with its wordmark-cum-censorbar might make you think that you're about to pick up something really naughty, but you're not. This is a very tame book, and a far cry from the flock-fests that some of this author's *other* works are, so if you're looking for that, disappointment looms heavy on the horizon.

That said, I thought this was pretty okay for a freebie! I'm currently in the middle of a purge-fest of my Kindle backlog, and as a result I'm finding all kinds of weird and random stuff on there that I don't even remember downloading. TRUST FUND is one of these books, a story about Christopher and Harper as young adults, meeting each other for the first time as stepbrother and stepsister in their crazy rich family with its myriad problems.

Skye Warren is an author that I only recently started reading and while I really like some of her stuff, some of it is just not that great. Here's the problem, I think: she wants to be Elle Kennedy, but she also wants to be Tarryn Fisher. The problem is, she doesn't appear to know which she wants to do more, so she tries to do both. So you'll get really dark books about messed up people with no morals (or questionable ones) and then you'll get books with that, but that also try to be this quirky, romantic love story.

Spoiler: this doesn't work.

I do like that all of her stories (at least the ones that I've read so far) appear to take place in Tanglewood. It's kind of hilarious to see these familiar characters marching in and out of their books, especially when the stories have a very different tone to them (like Gabriel Miller's cameo in ESCORT). Kitchy but fun. I can dig it.

So anyway, TRUST FUND is kind of a new adult story about Harper's "poor little rich girl" type problems, and Christopher's attraction to her manic pixie dreamgirl/tortured artist vibe. He even has to rescue her, Titanic-style, when she falls overboard from the family yacht by being a dumb-ass. His character plays a foil to hers as the principled but angsty patriarch, who must put duty above all else because of his ~honor~, even if it means hurting those who are closest to him. (This book is definitely more Elle Kennedy than Tarryn Fisher.) It's really short but it engaged me. I'd read the sequels.

2.5 out of 5 stars