Book Review: Dignity (Breaking Point #2) by Jay Crownover

Looks can be deceiving.

I knew that most people took one look at the ink and the impossibly big and strong body it covered and decided I was a brawler…a bruiser…a beast. However, I was hardwired to be a thinker, not a fighter—my mind being my greatest weapon and my biggest weakness.

I should have chosen to use my brain and talents to be one of the good guys, a hero, a man with dignity and worth.

I turned my back on dignity and sold my soul to the highest bidder, deciding to dance with the devil, instead.

I couldn’t figure out how to help myself, so there was zero chance I knew how to save someone else.

That someone else was Noe Lee. She was the unkempt, unruly thief who was just as smart as I was and twice as street savvy. She was annoyingly adorable beneath the dirt and grime and she was in trouble. In way over her head, I told myself it wasn’t my job to keep her from drowning. In the Point, it was sink or swim and I wasn’t the designated lifeguard on duty.

I had shut the door in her face, but now she’s gone…vanished…disappeared without a trace. It took less than a second for me to realize that I wanted her back.

When a woman comes along that melts all the frozen, hard things you’re made of, you’ll do anything you have to, to bring her home.

What you see is not always what you get…and with a man like me there is more than anyone ever bargained for.

Ms. Crownover has a unique way of writing her books, more of a monologue than dialogues; dual POV’s and in it, the characters, she so carefully crafts. On the face of it, this new book might look like any other romance; but its only with the author’s special talent that it turns out to be anything but normal.

But in Dignity, we have a genius hacker who meets his match in a slip of a girl who astounds him, in ways he did not comprehend when he first met her.

Snowden Stark is a man who lives in the shadows; he might work for the “bad guys” but in The Point, even some bad guys live by a code of honor and he adheres to it. Considered to be a robot by (not many!) people who know him, it doesn’t take the shrink in me to understand that this guy is used to repressing everything in his life; and by everything, I do mean everything until he comes face – to – face with Noe Lee.

Noe Lee is a homeless girl with skills; skills that apparently she uses to help people in need when she can. But once, just once she gets in a bit deep; she does the one thing she promised not to do – ask for help. From the one person whom she bested, but one she knows/believes lives by a code of honor.

Stark (for calling him Snow is only Noe’s right and I don’t want to get on her bad side!!) and Noe are two very broken people – but seeing them together shows that even the most broken people can have hope in their heart, even if its buried under deep.

I loved their relationship with each other – they saw each other with no rose colored glasses, they saw every jagged edge of the broken pieces that put them together and accepted each other unconditionally.

Never once did I hear the socially accepted words of love between them; what I did read was a promise in every word they said to each other; a promise that showed exactly what they meant to each other and nothing I had ever read was ever this beautiful!