Gloria has taken control of her life after ten years of being in an abused relationship. Leaving her boyfriend and getting her first job in a florist shop. Aldo has always been in love with Gloria, but used his National Guard tours as a way to remove himself from seeing her get hurt if he were to confront the man who was hurting her. When Gloria’s finally free Aldo promises them both that they will explore their future together as soon as his last tour is done. Unfortunately, he gets hurt, losing a limb and spends time recovering his strength and overcoming insecurities until he’s ready to put them back on that path together.

This is a re-release of a book Lucy Score released in 2018 and since I’ve read more recent books of hers, I have to think she’s improved as a writer A LOT since she wrote this book. Gloria’s tale and happily ever after definitely needed to be told. I love stories about women empowering themselves, and this was a classic tale of an abused woman. Aldo’s story also needed to be told. We have men and women who go on tour who come back both mentally and physically injured. I would’ve loved to have seen a fresh story about these two survivors and how they found love with each other. We got a little bit of that but I will admit to being disappointed in how this story was told.

As this is the second book in the series, you’d expect a little bit of referencing of things that had happened with the previous novels characters. Finally Mine takes this referencing 200% further, recapping huge portions of the story- in fact, I feel like the author cut and paste large chunks of the last story and included those bits into this book. I don’t know if it’s because I read these books only a few weeks apart, but there was so much repeating of what I’d already learned in the first novel that I started to not care about Gloria and Aldo’s tale. I spent my time skimming and looking for new portions of their story and then trying to piece those chunks together. I feel like the author did the reader a huge disservice in the style of writing she chose for Finally Mine. I think there are ways we could’ve learned their history where it would’ve felt fresh, or maybe picked up at some point in their plot and wrote some new content. As it stood, it felt like about 60% of this novel was re-capped. That is just not enough new content for me to develop feelings for these characters. The re-capping actually ended up being more annoying than helpful. I so wish this author hadn’t done that to these wonderful characters.

No surprise that I had trouble with this book. I think the characters should’ve been given a chance to have their own story instead of just re-telling what we’d learned in the previous novel, or shown the same plot from a different perspective. Because of that lack of new content I wasn’t able to care for these characters as much as they deserved. Maybe some day this author will re-write this novel so that these characters are allowed a chance to shine. ❤️❤️❣️

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley for an honest review and it was honest!

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