THE GIRL IN THE YELLOW VEST

THE GIRL IN THE YELLOW VEST            LORETTA HILL
Posted:  Jan. 29, 2014

  ‘We can’t choose who we fall in love with. It could be our best friend or … our worst enemy.’

Emily Woods counts cracks for a living. Concrete cracks. So when her long-term boyfriend dumps her, she decides it’s time for a change of scenery. Her best friend, Will, suggests joining his construction team in Queensland. Working next door to the Great Barrier Reef seems like just the sort of adventure she needs to reboot her life…until she realises that Will is not the person she thought he was.

Charlotte Templeton is frustrated with the lack of respect FIFO workers have for her seaside resort. But picking a fight with their tyrannical project manager, Mark Crawford, seems to lead to more complications than resolutions. The man is too pompous, too rude, and too damned good looking.

As both women strive to protect their dreams and achieve their goals, they discover that secrets will come out, loyalty often hurts, and sometimes the perfect man is the wrong one.

MY REVIEW:

     This book so far at the beginning is an interesting mix of four people’s lives and how they connect to one another.

     First you have the two best friends and engineer’s Emily Woods and Will Steward.  They went to the University together with four of their other friends.  Yet, Emily and Will had a special bond, never dated just friends.  Will in fact was dating Sasha when they met and since they were having problems thought about dropping her for Emily but never did.  His loss because he took Em to a party and Will’s best friend since grade school, Trent asked her out.  It was first love for the both of them.  A dagger to Will’s heart but he had waited too long to make a move.
     Will loved Em enough to continue to be her BFF to the point where she thought that anytime now she thought that Trent would be popping the question.  So was teasing Will about being his maid of honor.  Then at Lena and Dan’s wedding when all the Uni friends were together he could tell something was bothering her.  Trent wasn’t there yet that wasn’t unusual since he was a lawyer and he missed a lot of events.  Emily was slowly getting hammered with hardly touching her meal.  Will sees her go out by the pond and he follows.  When he asks what’s wrong and she says nothing he then ask if she is ready for dessert she says no then he knows something is wrong.  And asks again…

     Finally she tells him about how Trent took her to dinner two weeks ago not to pop “The Question” but to break up with her.  Saying it’s not her it’s him.  More freedom to date, so now she is single again after five years.  Not to mention that he asked her to move out so now she is living with her parents, she is slightly overweight and she hates her job.

Will throws her a bone and says he will try and give her an in for an engineer position that they have at his job site but he couldn’t promise anything.  That just made her day.  Not to mention he gave her what for because she was calling herself overweight.  He thought she looked wonderful and told her so.

     Now the other two the story revolves around is Charlotte Templeton and Mark Crawford.  Charlotte went to Uni and became a psychologist.  Giving her the ability to read the signs of why Mark had his aggressive behavior.  It was always triggered by something: abuse as a child, trauma in adulthood, loss, guilt, suffering so the tightness of his responses belied those truths.  Therefore, she was not fearful of Mark like everyone else.  Aggravated sometimes sad for but not mad.  She did however find him sexy but with her family’s business just barely making it, raising her 15 yr. old sister and caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s who has time for dating.

     As for Mark, everyone on the job site behind his back called him Caesar.  He is more of a ruler than a boss.  He is a cold blooded bastard to everyone.  You either feared him or hated him no in between.  No one knows since he still wears his wedding ring that his wife passed away 2 years ago from breast cancer and that’s where most of his anger comes from.  But like reaching out from the grave Kathryn had her lawyer send him a package 2 years after her death.  There was a DVD from him to watch and a list to follow exactly of things to do.  She knows he is grieving and it’s time to move on and she had wanted to make sure he did.

     This is where each of their journeys begins but definitely not the end.  This story is stacked with so much going on behind each sub story you get totally engulfed in the complicated lives of these four that you don’t realize you are totally invested.  The characters are multilayered in who they are and what they are about.

     Will, is so simple that Emily misses all the signs of what is going on.  Then there is Mark, he is so extremely complicated that Charlotte with her PHD can’t help but dig into his mind and heart.  Even if it hurts them both.  Then add all the other characters and WOW!  Loved it!!!

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