I couldn’t even say I liked what happened from there. I love slow-burn romances, but this would be an exception because nothing really important or note-worthy happened until the 80% mark. It took me a really long time to finish this book, because (not surprised) it’s a Mariana Zapata book and her novels are known to be really, really long. She is 23 years old and Aaron is 28 but reading Ruby’s POV felt like perceiving a 16 year-old’s voice. The thing I also noticed is that the characters seem to act like teenagers in this book.

For me that was quite exhausting and it really took a bit of patience for me to get through it because who knows, there might be things that are interesting in their e-mails, but then there was none and I felt like I was just wasting a lot of time for nothing. They e-mailed back and forth the first half of the book. Aaron is a soldier who is based in Afghanistan and Ruby lives with her parents in the US. Their means of communication is only through e-mails and chats. So the story was all about Ruby Marisol Santos and Aaron Hall whose friendship started virtually. There was no chemistry or a spark between them. Worse is that the heroine herself, a half-Filipina, tolerated it and called the food “gross”.Īpart from that, I didn’t feel an ounce of connection to the characters. Hate is such a strong word for it so maybe I could go for resentment over the fact that there was racism shoved in its part and characters even made fun of a Filipino food. First of all I don’t hate this book nor the author. What she didn’t count on was falling in love with the guy. Care packages were optional.īeen there, done that. The guidelines were simple: one letter or email a week for the length of his or her deployment. Ruby Santos knew exactly what she was getting herself into when she signed up to write a soldier overseas.

Mariana zapata dear aaron