Moment(s) by Lisa Terry

Genre: Contemporary, Young Adult, New Adult

Publishing Info: Self-published January 10^th 2015

Pages: 218

Star Rating: 4/5

Back Cover Summary:

Scottish rocker Julian McLane lives life as normally as possible. But fame can be lonely, which might be why he’d spent a year looking for the girl he caught making a wish behind the concert arena. His fans aren’t happy to share him now that he has found Emilie—too bad their violent displeasure only pushes the couple together.

Emilie needs protection from rabid fans, so Julian convinces her to tour with him and his prank-loving bandmates so his security team can watch over her too. Julian thinks their coupledom is as right as a love song. But something’s very wrong about murder victims wearing the band’s concert bracelets. Someone seems intent on downsizing the fandom.

Julian holds a twisted mess of clues about the killer’s identity, with every day bringing a different theory, and he’s beginning to think finding the killer means losing Emilie forever.

Moment(s) is a mix of romance and mystery, with a string of murders in the background of the romantic dealings between Julian and Emilie. Despite there being some issues with the book I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I’m going to deal with that issue at the start so we can get it over and done with. Basically, the book needed more proofreading. Reading a self-published book I’m expecting there will be some typos and things as the writer doesn’t have access to the editing team as someone publishing under a publisher. However, there were a few too many obvious typos in almost every chapter that could have easily been ironed out through a proofread. The last couple of chapters before the epilogue also needed more work as it was just very confusing and was nowhere near as polished as the first half of the book.

Now we’ve got that out of the way let’s talk about the actual story. I thought the plot was good and there were plenty of twists that I didn’t see coming. I also liked the mix of romance and mystery, I thought that combination of genre worked really well in this book.

The characters were great and all very likable. The interactions between the band members was realistic and humorous and just so well written. I also liked the slow build of the relationship between Julian and Emilie and thought their relationship was written very well. It was a bit predictable that they would end up together but the mystery going on in the background meant there was something to keep me reading.

I had some issues with the gymnastics described in the first half of the book. In addition to performing their songs the band also do some gymnastics on stage. I get that they are doing things that gymnasts wouldn’t normally do as they are outside the competition environment but some of it just seemed unrealistic. It was hard to visualise but at one point they were going directly from one piece of equipment to the next but given the structure of the equipment I don’t see how they could be placed close enough together for them to be able to swing from one to the other.

Overall I feel like the story had the potential to be a better novel than this. It perhaps needed a little more time to be edited before it was published. However I did thoroughly enjoy reading it and would definitely recommend it. I will be reading more books by Lisa Terry.