Review - Hold Me Like a Breath by Tiffany Schmidt (ARC)

Series: Once Upon a Crime Family #1
Genre: Contemporary Fairytale Retelling
Published: May 2015 by Bloomsbury
ARC - 400 pgs
Source: Goodreads Giveaway (Bloomsbury)
Add it // Buy it

Rating - DNF (Unfinished)

Penelope Landlow has grown up with the knowledge that almost anything can be bought or sold—including body parts. She’s the daughter of one of the three crime families that control the black market for organ transplants.

Penelope’s surrounded by all the suffocating privilege and protection her family can provide, but they can't protect her from the autoimmune disorder that causes her to bruise so easily.

And in her family's line of work no one can be safe forever.

Penelope has ever wanted is freedom and independence. But when she’s caught in the crossfire as rival families scramble for prominence, she learns that her wishes come with casualties, that betrayal hurts worse than bruises, that love is a risk worth taking . . . and maybe she’s not as fragile as everyone thinks.

Ever since winning an ARC of it from Goodreads and Bloomsbury, I’ve tried to read this book several times and it never worked out. Before I thought I wasn’t in the mood for the book, but now I believe it is the book. At this point I’ve read about a third of this story and I’m too frustrated to continue. This will be a DNF for me which I’m really disappointed about.

Personally, I thought the adaptation part of this story was very clever. This is a retelling of The Princess and the Pea and the main character has a rare condition which makes her very delicate. She has wealth and privilege because her family is at the top of the black market for organs. At the start this seemed like a well-built adaptation.

However, Penelope is frustratingly immature and had too many contradictions in her character. For example, in the beginning Penelope flaunts that she eavesdrops and believes she has a good idea of what is going on in the family business. Later when she has an opportunity to sit in on a meeting about serious business, Penelope zones out and explains how she has no idea how to use money. I understand the author was trying to show how naïve she was, but instead I just found it intensely annoying and contradictory to her earlier behavior.

The story was also slow to start and had a lot of predictable turns already. The romance also seemed like a huge focus of this story when many other plot points could have been explored in more detail. From other reviews I’ve checked out, it doesn’t seem like things will improve from here especially since many of them mentioned insta-love and a love triangle later on. (UGH!) At this point too many thing have piled up and I don’t have any interest in picking this up again.