Rebound

📖✨ 13Pages Review

🧠 Opening Chaos

After our short little Kindle detour with Adriano, we are back to the physical TBR.

And baby.

This one was something.

I’m finishing up the Manhattan Ruthless series by Sadie Kincaid, and this is Book 3 featuring Elijah and Amber.

Now I already read Broken, which is still my favorite in the series.

Book 2 was Promise Me Forever.

And now here we are with Book 3.

A second-chance romance.

A marriage in crisis.

Twenty-one years of history.

Two wealthy grown adults who apparently graduated from elite schools but skipped Communication 101.

Warm up the Chevy, Martha.

We’re going to therapy.

📚 The Situation

There are five James men:

Elijah.
Nathan.
Drake.
Mason.
Maddox.

Elijah is the oldest.

He runs the family tech business with Mason, Nathan and Drake are attorneys who started their own firm because apparently being rich was not enough. We needed everybody booked, busy, and emotionally unavailable.

Each book starts in the shadow of grief.

Two months after the death of Verona James, the family matriarch and Dalton James’s wife.

Every New Year’s Eve, the James family threw parties together.

Now Verona is gone.

Dalton is grieving.

The sons are grieving.

And Dalton gives his sons one piece of advice:

Never fall in love.

Sir.

That is not wisdom.

That is trauma wearing a smoking jacket.

And unfortunately?

Everybody listened.

💀 Character Energy

👑 Elijah James

Elijah is rich.

Powerful.

Successful.

Still wildly attracted to his wife.

And emotionally about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

This man loves Amber.

I do believe that.

But loving someone and showing up for them are not the same thing.

Elijah spent years choosing work, family obligations, grief management, sibling emergencies, and billionaire nonsense while Amber slowly disappeared inside their marriage.

And then when she finally says she wants a divorce?

Here comes Elijah like a beat-up caboose on a raggedy train talking about:

“But you abandoned me too.”

Sir.

Gather yourself.

You were out here drinking fifty-year-old Macallan, drunker than Cooter Brown, calling emergency sibling meetings like you were preparing a game of Battleship.

Meanwhile your wife was in the other room emotionally starving.

Now later, Elijah does become self-aware.

When Amber tells him:

“I learned to stop needing you because I couldn’t rely on you.”

That cut him like it should have.

Because baby, yes.

That is the bill coming due.

🧊 Amber James

Amber is the ice queen.

Lonely.

Elegant.

Perfect.

A philanthropist.

A billionaire’s wife.

A woman living in a big empty house with a husband who barely comes home and a marriage that has been dead in the street wearing designer shoes.

She and Elijah do not even sleep in the same room.

Hard to get it on when you’re operating out of separate zip codes.

Now Amber is hurt.

Deeply hurt.

And she has reason to be.

But baby.

She also caused a portion of her own suffering.

Because Verona, Elijah’s dying mother, said something cruel to her.

Something awful.

Something along the lines of:

You should not have married my son knowing you were broken.

And instead of telling Elijah?

Amber swallowed that pain and let it sit in her body for fourteen years.

FOURTEEN.

Years.

Girl.

You cannot build an entire haunted house inside your marriage and then get mad because your husband can’t see the ghosts.

He is not a mind reader.

He cannot pull a crystal ball out of the sea.

Was Elijah neglectful?

Yes.

Was Amber hurt?

Yes.

Were both of these adults talking to walls instead of each other?

Absolutely.

One was talking to the wall.

The other was talking to a fence.

Nobody was talking to each other.

And that is how you end up with a 475-page endurance test of misery, sex, grief, and poor decisions.

📉 Plot Notes & Chaos Corner

Let’s talk about this marriage.

Because this was not a marriage.

This was two people legally attached to each other while playing emotional hide-and-seek in a mansion.

Amber thinks Elijah does not choose her.

Elijah thinks Amber hates him.

Amber stopped coming around the James family.

Elijah does not know why.

Amber is mad he did not notice.

Elijah is confused because nobody told him anything.

Child.

This is messier than an episode of Atlanta Housewives.

And then we find out Drake knew what Verona said.

Drake heard it.

Drake knew Amber was hurt.

And nobody thought to tell Elijah?

Nobody?

These people are lawyers and CEOs and marketing geniuses, but apparently one direct conversation would have caused the building to collapse.

Then Amber runs to Charleston to be with Granny Lucille.

And let’s pause right there.

Granny Lucille came out at 73?

I know that’s right, Granny.

Go fly that rainbow flag, honey.

Honestly, Granny Lucille was one of the few people in this book acting like she had sense and a pulse.

😒 Side-Eye Section

Now I need to discuss something very serious.

Amber James is a New York billionaire’s wife.

Why is her makeup running?

Why is this woman running around New York crying with raccoon eyes?

Never.

Not a billionaire’s wife.

Absolutely not.

I have access to smudge-proof eyeliner.

You mean to tell me Amber James does not?

Baby, no.

Not with that tax bracket.

Not with that social calendar.

Not with that closet.

If your marriage is falling apart, fine.

But your mascara should not be participating.

🔥 The Spice Situation

Since the elevator nonsense, Elijah and Amber are banging like bunny rabbits while still getting divorced.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Divorce Court Edition.

By halfway through the book, we’ve had at least four spicy scenes.

That’s Sadie Kincaid for you.

She keeps it hotter than a crack pipe on payday.

And the spice itself?

It was doing what it came to do.

But here’s the problem:

Sex kept muddying the emotional water.

Because every time Amber needed space to figure out who she was outside of being Mrs. Elijah James, here comes Elijah invading that space like a Space Invader with abs.

Sir.

Let the woman breathe.

😒 What Didn’t Work

Now here is where the book started tap dancing on my nerves.

The third-act breakup.

Why?

No, really.

Why?

We already had a breakup at the beginning.

The whole book is about a marriage falling apart.

So why did we need a breakup inside the breakup?

What is this?

A Pink Panther mystery?

A double cross of a double cross?

More miscommunication in a book already built on miscommunication?

Baby, I was tired.

Then Amber is sexually assaulted by Freddie, her friend Martha’s husband.

And instead of the book letting that moment breathe and become about Amber’s fear, violation, and need for support, we immediately use it to create more misunderstanding.

Nathan sees Amber go into Freddie’s office.

Nathan runs to Elijah like Gossip Girl in a tailored suit.

He tells Elijah Amber is playing him for a fool.

Elijah believes Nathan.

Then Elijah believes coke-snorting Freddie.

Freddie Kemp, who sounds like he skis the slopes more than he practices law.

Jesus, Elijah.

For a tech CEO, you were about as bright as an unlit candle.

This was the moment I switched teams.

Because yes, Amber made mistakes.

Yes, she held onto pain for fourteen years.

Yes, she needed to open her mouth.

But after everything she said about Elijah choosing his family over her?

He proved her right.

He listened to his brother.

He believed the wrong people.

He did not call his wife first.

Sir.

You are not just a terrible husband.

You are the MVP of terrible husbands.

Gold medal.

Podium finish.

National anthem playing.

💔 What Actually Hurt

This book works best when it focuses on the real pain.

Amber has been with Elijah since she was nineteen.

She is now forty.

Her entire adult identity has been wrapped around being Mrs. Elijah James.

She did not use her degree.

She did not build her own career.

She became the billionaire’s wife.

The socialite.

The philanthropist.

The perfect woman in the perfect house with the perfect life that was quietly eating her alive.

Her parents are terrible.

Her only real safe place is Granny Lucille in Charleston.

She has no real support system.

And when she finally tries to choose herself?

The book keeps pulling her back into Elijah’s orbit before she can finish becoming a person outside of him.

That is where I struggled.

I needed Amber to have more runway.

I needed her to rediscover herself outside of sex.

Outside of illness.

Outside of attraction.

Outside of Elijah showing up and interrupting her healing journey with billionaire husband energy.

I needed them to date after the divorce.

I needed them to rebuild.

I needed them to learn each other again as adults in this phase of life.

Because after fourteen years of pain?

One or two grand gestures is not enough.

That happily ever after needed more emotional foundation.

😏 What Worked

Now let me be fair.

Because there were things I liked.

I liked that the author did not spoon-feed us one simple reason for the collapse of this marriage.

Was it infertility?

Was it grief?

Was it work?

Was it Elijah choosing family over Amber?

Was it Verona’s cruel words?

Was it Amber’s silence?

Was it all of it?

Yes.

And I actually liked that.

Because sometimes pain is not one clean little wound.

Sometimes it is a pileup.

A chain reaction.

A decade of small fractures nobody fixed until the whole house leaned sideways.

I also liked Elijah’s self-awareness when it finally showed up.

Late.

Raggedy.

Barefoot in the street.

But it showed up.

And I did like the idea of Amber being an asset to James Tech and finally stepping into something that belonged to her.

But again?

The book needed more room to let that breathe.

🔥 Spice Rating

🌶️🌶️🌶️✨ — 3.5 chili peppers

Hot.

Frequent.

Emotionally messy.

Optional tag:

Divorce proceedings with benefits.

📊 Damage Report

⭐⭐⭐✨ — 3.5 stars

Messy marriage.

Strong emotional premise.

Too much miscommunication.

Third-act breakup should have stayed home.

🧨 Final Verdict

This book was not bad.

But it was not great either.

It was okay.

A chaotic, spicy, emotionally exhausting second-chance romance about two adults who loved each other but somehow spent fourteen years communicating like smoke signals were their only option.

There was a good story here.

A real story.

A marriage damaged by grief, infertility, neglect, family loyalty, silence, shame, and one dying woman’s cruel words.

But the emotional payoff did not fully land for me.

Not because I did not want Elijah and Amber together.

But because I needed to believe they had truly rebuilt something.

And I am not sure the book gave me enough of that.

By 80%, Amber still did not fully trust Elijah.

Elijah still did not fully trust Amber.

Then suddenly the divorce goes through and we are supposed to believe everything is healed?

Baby, no.

You cannot microwave fourteen years of marital damage and call it dinner.

💬 Signature Outro

This book needed:

– therapy
– smudge-proof eyeliner
– direct communication
– one less third-act breakup
– Nathan minding his business
– Freddie Kemp far away from women
– and somebody to tell Elijah that choosing your wife should not require a committee meeting

Will I read the next book?

Yes.

Will I read the one after that?

Also yes.

Because apparently I am a glutton for punishment and second-chance romance keeps asking me to suffer for character development.