Review tour: Draw Me In by Megan Squires

He’s a young, up and coming businessman with the keys to his family’s Italian wine enterprise.

I’m a fine arts student, navigating life in the Big Apple, my pencil and sketchpad in hand.

We meet. We fall in love.

But it’s not that story.

Sometimes, by a rare gift of fate, two lives cross paths. And hey, if that happens to occur when staring at Michelangelo’s naked masterpiece, even better. We can tell our future children how a seventeen-foot tall marble guy named David brought us together.

But there’s always more to a relationship than its beginning and ever after. In life, there’s a whole lot of backstory. There are ex-fiancés and hot roommates and family members whose advice continues, even beyond the grave.

When you say you love someone, it’s never just that one person you’re saying it to. And it’s never just that one moment that sets everything in motion.

There is always more that draws you in.

A free e-book copy was given to me for the Draw Me In review tour.

It’s not often I can say  I’ve read a book I could truly say I enjoyed all the way through.  So many authors seem to fall flat at one point or another in the book, either in plot points, in weaving things together, or the characters.  While Draw Me In wasn’t completely perfect, it was about as close as you can get from a book.  Every now and then there were things that threw it off, such as points I felt like it was unfinished or the editing hadn’t caught a plot point that Squires had added in later and needed to connect earlier in the book, but it came nowhere near to overshadowing the good parts of the book.

I loved Julie.  I often find myself getting irritated with characters who are centered around how clumsy they are, but even though it was such a big part of the book, there was so much more to her than that, making her a well-rounded character and person.  She’s witty sometimes and doesn’t know what to say other times.  At one point she finds Leo’s best friend in her bed, having a dream-induced Western adventure, and she goes right along with it.  She’s articulate without sounding like she belongs in a Shakespearean play, although she has her moments when she sounds like every other girl her age.  When Leo calls her special, it doesn’t make me roll my eyes.

The background characters are great too, from Julie’s roommate Ian to Leo’s ex-fiancé Sofia.  It was a breath of fresh air, as far as I was concerned, that Sofia wasn’t cast as an antagonist.  She didn’t try to steal Leo from Julie, or rub it in her face that they were together for six years.  She’s not a complete angel, but she had a place in the story that propelled it forward without making her into the mean girl that so many ex-girlfriends in books are.

The last few chapters made me cry.  I say that with no shame at all.  There was just so much to them in so few words that I found myself teary-eyed as I continued on.  This is a book I’d be more than happy to recommend to anyone.  So, happy reading!

To purchase the book, you find it at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.