Feature and Giveaway: Healing My Heart by Aleya Michelle

Roxy is in a bind...

Should she stay true to herself or should she follow her wounded heart back to her first love?

Back to the one who left her heartbroken and alone.

Who will be the one to help heal her heart?

Will it be Dylan, who started as her re-bound, but has become her strength and her life line over the past few months.

Or will it be Kade, the one who stole her heart and showed her the true meaning of love. Then showed her all the despair, vulnerability and pain a broken heart can cause.

Which path will bring her to her happily ever after?

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ARC Review: Healing My Heart by Aleya Michelle

Healing My Heart is the second book in Aleya Michelle's My Heart series and should only be read after you have read Breaking My Heart. Healing My Heart is the continuing story of Roxy and Kade and picks up where Breaking My Heart left off. I will admit that I really struggled with the first book in this series. I had a lot of problems with it, and I wasn't sure if I would continue with the series or not. But when I had the opportunity to read and review this one, I knew I wanted to continue the series to see what would happen for Roxy and Kade.

After having her heart broken by the love of her life, Roxy tries to pick up the pieces of her life and move forward. She is seeing Dylan and although she doesn't love him, he has helped her get through her darkest time. But Dylan starts to change and soon he is no longer the sweet boyfriend that she has come to know and care about and he is becoming controlling and possessive. Roxy begins to feel as though something is off with Dylan and she wonders if she really knows him as well as she thinks she does. When she runs across Kade while out with friends, her feelings resurface for him and she knows that she needs to make a choice in her life. When Roxy breaks things off with Dylan, he doesn't take the news well and is determined to do anything to get her back. With Kade in the picture again, Dylan is determined to see to it that if he can't have Roxy no one else will either.

I knew Dylan was crazy from the start. I didn't like him, and something about him just felt off for me. He was possessive and controlling, and far too clingy. I realize that Roxy had found some relief from her pain in him and that she had grown to care for him, but I didn't understand why it took her so long to see that she shouldn't be with him. Roxy and Kade were much better this time around for me. I liked them both more, and Kade seemed to get over his random personality shift from the first book. He was back to being the guy that we first met and fell in love with, and he seemed to be genuine in his feelings for Roxy. He was really sincere when apologizing to her and telling her that he would earn her trust back in the future. I felt like Roxy was better in this book with the exception of her delaying the inevitable with Dylan. She was forgiving with Kade and she really faced her feelings for him. She was able to see how much she loved him and that even though she was hurt, that they deserved to take another shot at something between them. Kade and Roxy are really hot together, and I loved getting to see them working things out. Kade and Roxy made each other happy, and I think that they fit together in a way that they don't with anyone else.

Overall, I am glad that I decided to continue this series. I think that Kade and Roxy have come a long way in their relationship and as individuals. I will say that this book felt a bit drawn out until Kade showed up, and I found it hard to really get into up until that point. There were also some inconsistencies that really drove me nuts. They were small details, but I thought that they really distracted from the story for me. In one scene Kade and Roxy had been apart for 6 months, and yet in the next it was 4 months. It flipped back and forth several times, and I never was sure which was actually correct. There was also another example where a lime from one scene turned into a lemon in another. It was just little stuff like that that shouldn't have been more than a small detail among many, but because of the mistakes were made glaringly obvious. I also felt like the age of these characters was really ambiguous and confusing at times. It was stated that Dylan was a student of a high school in an article only 8 months old, and yet it is also mentioned that he had a job and one of his friends that they hang out with was from university. The timeline was confusing, and I couldn't tell what was correct and what was a mistake. Clearly if he was in high school only eight months prior, then he was either the smartest and fastest student ever to complete university or there was an error. I know that these type of mistakes aren't the whole story, but when there are that many they add up quickly and become a huge distraction from what is actually going on. I am curious to see what happens in the next story though. I felt like this story had a pretty clear ending, so I am wondering what Aleya Michelle has in store for these characters next.

**ARC Provided by Book Plug Promotions**

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Review: Breaking My Heart by Aleya Michelle

Breaking My Heart is the debut novel from Aleya Michelle, and is also the first book in her My Heart Trilogy. When I was given the opportunity to review this book, I thought that it was a standalone. I had no idea that this was actually book #1, and I was not expecting the book to have a huge cliffhanger. I can honestly tell you though that by the time that I had reached the end I was more than ready for this one to be done. I can honestly say that if I had known that we wouldn't be given an ending in this book, I would have DNF'd with this one. Unfortunately this wasn't at all what I had been expecting, and I was disappointed with this story.

Roxy is a 24 year old graphic designer. She is used to partying with her best friend Jemma and uses drugs to help escape her past. She has been hurt and betrayed before, and always expects the worst when it comes to men. When she first meets Kade she thinks that he is just like all the others, but decides to give him a shot. After making a few mistakes though, Roxy begins to realize that Kade is different from other guys out there. He is 23, he treats her well, and he is determined to be successful. Not only does he have a regular job, but he is also working on becoming a pro-surfer and spends a lot of his time training. But with so much demand on his time and with differences of opinion, Kade and Roxy's new relationship begins to hit some rough patches. Can they figure out a way to make a relationship work, and can Roxy get over her past and truly let Kade in?

I really liked Kade at the beginning of this story, and I honestly couldn't figure out what he saw in Roxy. The way that she treated him at the beginning was horrible, and frankly she acted like a total psycho. I didn't understand why he kept giving her chance after chance when he didn't even know her. But as the story progressed, I started to really dislike Kade. He had a total personality shift and I have no idea what happened to him. He started acting completely different and turned into a real jerk. He wasn't honest with Roxy and he started lashing out at her, and it just didn't make sense. Roxy was hard to like at first. She was used to sleeping around and not letting anyone close, and she used her past as an excuse to lose herself in drugs. She also treated Kade horribly at first and judged him pretty harshly without even really knowing him. She made a lot of assumptions and should have just talked to him before jumping to conclusions. But once she opened up to Kade and really gave him a chance, she started to really grow and change for the better. She realized that drugs were not good for her and that she needed to make a change. She cleaned up her life and started to see what a future could be like with a man that she loved. I will admit that Kade and Roxy did have chemistry, and at times they really did seem to work well as a couple together. But I also thought that a good portion of the time, they were both on completely different pages and seemed to not really take the other into consideration.

Besides the fact that the characters drove me nuts at times and the fact that they were extremely inconsistent, I also was really upset that it wasn't made known that this book was part of a series. I didn't have a clue until after I had already started reading this one and looked closely at the cover to see that it said book one. I also felt like this story had times that it was really confusing and would seem to jump around a bit, and I would be scrambling trying to figure out where we were and how we got there. The dialogue had a tendency to be repetitive, and frankly it was pretty ridiculous at times. I felt like this one was just really cheesy and there were so many times that I rolled my eyes over something that Kade or Roxy said. Especially some of the things that Kade said, because honestly I have never met a guy who would say some of the things he said. It just didn't ring true to his character, and was just too unrealistic. I also found it confusing that for the most part this was told from Roxy's POV, but that it would randomly switch over to Kade's POV for a chapter here and there. It was just really disorienting the way that it was done, and honestly when we got Kade's POV it usually just irritated me and made me dislike his character more. He seemed to turn into this complete douche when we got a look inside his thoughts. Overall, this book just wasn't for me. It wasn't what I was expecting, and honestly the only reason I finished was to see what happened. If I had known that it didn't end at the ending, I would have put this one down and quit. I think that this story could potentially be a good one, but I think that it needs quite a bit of work first. This one is written by an Australian author, and the terms of this book are definitely true to what they would say. It wasn't hard to figure out what the author was talking about, but I think that for the most part there are several words in this story that most people will not be familiar with. If you are looking for a trilogy that is about young and immature characters fumbling their way through first love while growing up and developing a relationship for the first time, you might give this one a shot.

**Review Copy Provided by Between the Sheets Promotions**

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