I received this book for free from Miranda Kenneally in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Breathe, Annie, Breathe by Miranda Kenneally
Series: Hundred Oaks #5
Published by Sourcebooks Fire on July 15th 2014
Genres: Contemporary, YA
Source: Miranda Kenneally
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Annie hates running. No matter how far she jogs, she can’t escape the guilt that if she hadn’t broken up with Kyle, he might still be alive. So to honor his memory, she starts preparing for the marathon he intended to race.
But the training is even more grueling than Annie could have imagined. Despite her coaching, she’s at war with her body, her mind—and her heart. With every mile that athletic Jeremiah cheers her on, she grows more conflicted. She wants to run into his arms…and sprint in the opposite direction. For Annie, opening up to love again may be even more of a challenge than crossing the finish line.
"Breathe, Annie, Breathe is an emotional, heartfelt, and beautiful story about finding yourself after loss and learning to love. It gave me so many feels. Her best book yet." — Jennifer Armentrout, New York Times bestselling author of Wait for You
Miranda Kenneally has done it again folks! I always know that when I pick up a book by Kenneally that I am in for a fair amount of swooning, but I have to say that with Breathe, Annie, Breathe I got even more than I could have expected. Full of wonderful characters, a swoon-inducing romance and a full range of emotion, I think this is the best in the Hundred Oaks series yet!
In the fifth instalment in the series we are introduced to Annie who has recently lost her long term boyfriend and is now training to run a marathon in his honour. What I’m sure you can gather from this already is: SPORTS! Yes, while previous books featured football, baseball and even horseback riding this book tackles running. Oh man, let me tell you that I learned a thing or two from reading this. The effort and training that goes into preparing for a marathon is shocking! The eating too! I loved that once again I was sucked into this aspect of the story and full-on rooting for Annie to achieve her goal.
Through her training she is introduced (from the one and only Jordan Woods who is now Coach Woods) to Matt who trains people for marathons. Through Matt she meets his brother Jeremiah and therein lies our love story. I feel like I might say this with every book in the series but Jeremiah is now my favourite love interest. He was a real mans man. He lived on the edge (an adrenaline junkie,) was a true southern gentleman and all I wanted to do was run my hands through his floppy hair (I have a thing for guys with longer hair, ok!) I loved how, because our characters were a little older in this one, we got to see a more mature growth to the relationship. Jere was 20 and Annie is 18 so I felt like I could connect a little more to Annie’s thought processing when she was thinking about where she wanted things to go. Of course the whole time she was thinking, I wanted her to be doing (*wink* *wink* if you know what I mean) and this led to some major sexual tension which I loved and hated in equal measure.
All of the debating Annie does when it comes to Jere is really well thought out. After losing Kyle she doesn’t know if she wants to jump into something head on with a guy who lives as dangerously as he does, which was so completely understandable. The circumstances surrounding Kyle’s death is slowly revealed through some well place flashbacks and throughout the story we get to see how his death has affects so many aspects of Annie’s life. Her relationship with her mother has gone downhill and she’s saddened to be alone because he had really become to center of her life in the three years that they were together. We get to watch her attempt to work on bringing back friendships that she lost over the years and start to put herself out there. Watching her bridge these relationships and deal with her loss was really emotional and I got teary eyed on more than one occasion with this one.
I know I mentioned Jordan earlier and that I say what I am about to say after every book but I need to say it again. I love getting to see characters from previous books in this series. After Racing Savannah I really wanted Kelsey’s story and here we get to see her quite a bit because she was best friends with Annie growing up. We also get to see Savannah & Jack and so many others here and there. This series really does just keep getting better and better and just when I think Kenneally can’t possibly top herself, she does.
5 Hot Espressos
About the Author
Growing up in Tennessee, Miranda Kenneally dreamed of becoming an Atlanta Brave, a country singer (cliché!), or a UN interpreter. Instead she writes, and works for the State Department in Washington, D.C., where George W. Bush once used her shoulder as an armrest. Miranda loves Twitter, Star Trek and her husband.
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