Alone With You by Aly Martinez

Posted August 22, 2024 in review Tags:

Alone With You by Aly Martinez

Genres: Contemporary Romance
Source: ARC
Also by this author: Fighting Shadows (On the Ropes, #2), The Fall Up, Fighting Solitude (On The Ropes Book 3)

Goodreads

Pain trapped me in this house. Can love set me free?

Death had been chasing me my entire life. I survived the horrors of war, but it was the aftermath that truly destroyed me.

People called me a recluse, but the only time I didn’t feel like I was suffocating was inside that house.

For my daughter, I kept some semblance of normalcy by implementing a rigid routine. Once a week, I forced myself to walk to the diner at the end of the block—a ritual I despised but relied on as my last anchor to the real world.

Until the day a “Closed” sign on the door shattered my fragile existence. Worse, the new owner was the most haunting ghost from my past.

It had been years since I’d laid eyes on Gwendolyn Pierce. She hated me—and rightly so. But when a film crew arrived in town to dig into my past, she became my only ally.

With my secrets threatened, I leaned on Gwen, forging a connection neither of us could deny. But with a past as dark as ours, I feared it would eclipse any hope for a future.

I always said that when Death finally came for me, I would be ready, eager, and alone.
Always alone.

But for Gwen, maybe I could face the world again as long as it meant I could be alone—with her.

Alone with you is a blend of single mom, second chance, and mystery. I wasn’t sure what I expected when I started this book, but these two characters have a complex past that took a lot of unraveling.

Truett is a recluse who only ventures out of his house once a week. He has pretty severe PTSD. Gwen has come back to town to renovate and reopen the local diner (the one place Truett would go outside of his house). Gwen is a divorced single mom, so she has her own baggage, plus her and Truett have a history. Truett’s past was just horrible and its impossible to not feel for him. Gwen’s life hasn’t been easy either, so you just want to wrap these two up and protect them from the world. I forgot how much I feel like this for Aly Martinez’s characters. She writes excellent, well rounded characters with complexity. The plot centers around their attempts to carve out a life for themselves despite everything. It is messy and tear jerking at times, but you never stop rooting for them.

The story is told in dual POV with flashbacks; this can annoy some readers, but I think the way the story is told with the flashbacks is important to character building for sure. Alone With You is emotional and at times, surprising in its twists. Great read!