First Love by Michelle Sutton ~ 4 stars

First Love

Michelle Sutton

Tombstone Treasures series #2

Desert Breeze Publishing

About the book:

Josiah and Tara had enjoyed acting in their high school plays. They had also been each others' first lover... in fact; most of the time they'd spent together had been in Tara's bed. When Josiah became a Christian, he left Tara to go to college and didn't look back.

Four years later, Josiah is back in town when his father has a near-fatal heart attack. When they meet up again they realize how much their separation had hurt each of them. But now Tara is a Christian and is trying to live a life that is pleasing to God.

Josiah wants Tara back, but neither knows how to relate to each other without the physical intimacy they once shared. They are determined to do things right this time, but find it more challenging than they'd anticipated.

My review:
*Since my review copy was an ARC, some of the things mentioned in my review might not be the same as in the final version.*

First, I’m just going to say that I loved the subject that Michelle dealt with in this book. It is about two teens who had sex outside of marriage, then broke up. Later, they meet and are both Christians who want to renew their relationship, except this time do everything God’s way. I thought Michelle did a great job of portraying their struggle to stay pure and honor God with their relationship. To me, reading the book was kind of like hearing about some friends of mine who kept messing up, and I felt like I wanted to help them understand it and stay strong but couldn’t.

Some of the dialogue could be changed to follow more logical patterns. (Such as characters saying seemingly random things to make the dialogue go in a new direction.) But, that was pretty minor and could easily be fixed. For the most part, the character’s emotions were realistically done and there were only a few places where I felt like an emotion would come up that wasn’t warranted by the situation. However, that was pretty minor as well.

All in all, I really liked this book and its message about purity in relationships. It gave me some stuff to think about in terms of relationships and boundaries when dating. (Just a warning though, due to the subject matter and writing style of the author, there are some steamy scenes between the characters. I would not recommend this to younger teens.)