Helpful Score: 2
I loved this bbok! The characters are so real, and the story is wonderful!
Helpful Score: 2
This was a very good book about a young girl who was kidnapped by her mother when she was four and lived a life in a cult. However, after her mother passes away when she is six, her life turns into a living nightmare. Once she escapes, she has to learn to live her life like a normal person and learn to live with her past and to love again. Along the way, however, she has help from a private investigator who was hired to locate her for her father after she was spotted at an art fair.
Great read. I highly recommend. I couldn't put it down!!!
Great read. I highly recommend. I couldn't put it down!!!
Helpful Score: 2
I'm the type of person that has to finish a book once I start reading it, but Out of the Dark seriously made me wish I wasn't. I had to grit my teeth to get through it. The POV was jumpy and inconsistent, the hero was as preachy as a Baptist minister, the heroine was maudlin, the heroine's father was saccharine-sweet, and the dialogue was downright sappy. The only characters that seemed real to me were the villains. I would not recommend this book.
Helpful Score: 1
I just finished this book a couple hours ago. It is one of the best books I have read this year. Sala does an excellent job developing her characters and is able to emotionally wrap her readers into her characters' lives. I cried no less than 4 times during this book. Jade, the main character, was taken by he mother in the middle of the night to go and live with a cult in the mid-70's. Jade's mother dies and horrible things happen to Jade left alone in the cult. 20 years later, her father finally finds her with the help of a friend, Luke Kelly, who takes a personal stake in Jade's life. Sala had me hooked from beginning to end and I had a hard time putting this book down!
Helpful Score: 1
Readers who have come to appreciate Sala's predilection for controversial topics and her ability to skillfully convey their emotional impact will relish this but moving romantic suspense novel. Kidnapped by her upper-middle-class mother, who'd inexplicably "turned into some mushroom-smoking hippie named Ivy," six-year-old Jade Cochrane was prostituted to pedophiles following her mom's death and knew little of childhood besides life in a cult called The People of Joy. Now a gorgeous, albeit troubled, street painter in her late 20s, Jade unwittingly sets in motion a reunion with her long-lost father when she sells a painting to one of his vacationing friends. After Jade's tumultuous, highly publicized return to her loving father's arms, former cult members get wind of her whereabouts and threaten the seeming safety and happiness she's finally found with her father and kind-hearted security expert Luke Kelly. The use of flashbacks lends credibility to Jade's past and helps flesh out her character. Although Sala (Dark Water, etc.) has the tendency to overstate her points, which is evidenced by the book's de trop epilogue, she handles the sensitive issue of Jade's past with skill, never allowing her story to descend into melodrama. In short, this is the perfect entertainment for those looking for a suspense novel with emotional intensity.
