“Clear off a top spot on your Best of 2020 list.
Playing with Fire is coming in HOT!”
--Harloe Rae, USA Today bestselling author
Playing With Fire, an all-new intense and all consuming small town standalone romance from USA Today bestselling author L.J. Shen is available now!
A broken boy on the path to destruction.
A scarred girl without direction.
A love story carved in secrets, inked with pain and sealed with a lie.
Grace Shaw and West St. Claire are arctic opposites.
She is the strange girl from the food truck.
He is the mysterious underground fighter who stormed into her sleepy Texan college town on his motorcycle one day, and has been wreaking havoc since.
She is invisible to the world.
He is the town’s beloved bad boy.
She is a reject.
He is trouble.
When West thrusts himself into Grace’s quiet life, she scrambles to figure out if he is her happily-ever-after or tragic ending.
But the harder she pushes him away, the more he pulls her out of her shell.
Grace doesn’t know much about anything beyond her town’s limits, but she does know this:
She is falling in love with the hottest guy in Sheridan U.
And when you play with fire—you ought to get burned.
Download your copy today or read FREE in Kindle Unlimited!
Amazon: https://amzn.to/35scdah
Amazon Universal: http://mybook.to/PWFLJShen
Amazon Paperback: https://amzn.to/3bDlzRh
Add to PLAYING WITH FIRE to Goodreads - https://bit.ly/MDVljgr
About L.J. Shen
L.J. Shen is a USA Today, Washington Post and Amazon #1 best-selling author of contemporary, New Adult and YA romance. Her books have been sold to twenty different countries.
She lives in California with her husband, son, cat and eccentric fashion choices, and enjoys good wine, bad reality TV shows and catching sun rays with her lazy cat.
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Website: http://www.authorljshen.com/
FANTASTICALLY written, EMOTIONALLY saturated and EXCELLENTLY Narrated. A small town romance with feel good sentiments and hopeful, uplifting mood. It's a deviation from her tried and tested asshole, HS/mafia trope, but successfully proves the fact that you can't keep a good writer down.
Shen is back..and how!!!
Not that she had gone anywhere. Her last series was well written and hugely popular, but somehow I couldn't connect with them 100% and found myself searching for the soul- the intrinsic connection with the characters that put my heart IN the story.
Well to be honest, I'm more happy than most of her loyal readers cause I never lost faith in her ability as a writer, just felt that she got distracted for a time... But that's JUST ME!!
The story is ON FIRE! The characters are forged in FIRE, have to stand the test of time and tribulations and walk through FIRE. Their hearts catch the FIRE of passion and ultimately all burns down to ashes, but the Phoenix dusts them off and rises from the FIRE! The words leapt up like flames and engulfed my heart. Took me back to her earlier work- Sparrow which had just consumed me whole
"We’re PLAYING WITH FIRE"
"My battle scars were external, on the surface. His were internal, but cut deep. He was disfigured inside, perfect outside. A lethal combination."
A girl with scarred exterior meets a boy with scarred interior and they work side by side to smooth each other's struggle wounds. They're quite an unlikely pair, all the time at logger heads, trying to hammer at each other's walls to unearth the shiny souls they've been hiding neath.
"As I watched him there, I didn’t see the most popular guy in college.
The sex god.
The illegal fighter.
I saw the loneliest boy I’d ever laid eyes on.
Sweet, confused, and lost.
And I thought, bitterly, he didn’t even know that across the parking lot sat a girl just like him."
Gracie Mae Shaw is hiding in plain sight, clutching her invisibility cloak tight, just flying under the social radar. West St. Claire barges in her space and tears down her safe circle of fire to want to pull her out of it, yet ends up getting pulled in by her mesmerizing eyes and sliver of radiant heart she hides beneath tons of make up and ball cap.
He lifts her chin to show her his world, she rises up on tiptoes & kisses him to make his hurt get better. This beautiful, doomed love is what I was looking for and it brought tears to my eyes in many places. Leigh has once again proven, she's an indomitable writer, a force to be reckoned with.
"He was going to soar and burst like a supernova once he was out of this small Texas town, and I was going to remain the ashes he left behind—the stardust that slowly descended the earth in his wake."
Out of all her younger characters or #Totholes as they're popularly known as, this couple shows the most promise. There IS witty banter and sassy ribbing throughout, but refreshingly it enhances the mood of the characters and advances the story.
COURAGE being the front & center moral is highlighted in the struggles ALL the characters face. Be it Grace, West, Grandma, Even Tess... The ability to rise back again after being charred by life is what the book is all about
Everyone is carrying their own Phoenix, and their fall from grace, their burnt to ashes lives. Leigh beautifully writes that's not the end. She makes their wings flutter and gets the fire going again. That was the MOST BEAUTIFUL part of the story for me.
5 stars for Phoenix Rising
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