Paintings of you – reviewed by ‘Salga’

[NB review contributed by 'Salga', posted by Admin]

Title: Paintings of you
Authors: Mia Paluzzi and Chris Delk
Genre: Romance
URL:http://www.boyslovebooks.com/books/paintings-of-you
Price:US $12.95
Other Information/warnings:none

Summary:
Claudio Verges has a secret. Even though he is an already famous artist who is accepted into a university to further enhance his talent, he feels nothing for his art. No inspiration, no passion, nothing. He’s just going through the motions putting paint on canvas and is afraid everyone will discover what a fraud he is.

Benedict Conner, alumni of the university and up and coming photographer, helps Claude to find inspiration and passion and how to put that into his paintings.

Review by Salga

The story started off well introducing some interesting characters that play secondary roles throughout the book. Hero Dantes, an interior design student, is Claude’s flamboyant and irrepressible roommate. John Winters, an aspiring actor and Hero’s boyfriend, carries around a homemade doll named ‘Honey’ that was made for him by Hero. These two side characters showed much promise and livened things up, but were never fully developed nor utilized to their full potential in my opinion. Beatrice, as Claude’s longtime friend, has a crush on Benedict but knows there’s no chance for a romantic relationship.

There is, of course, the prerequisite love triangle and misunderstandings as Claude develops feelings for Benedict but never acts on them outside of friendship because he believes Benedict is in love with Beatrice. Benedict mistakenly believes Claude to be in love with Beatrice and tries to repress his feelings for Claude out of respect for her and wanting her to find happiness since he doesn’t return her feelings.

The art style has a quirky flavor to it in a western manga style, although the style doesn’t appeal to me, it was technically well done. The plot of thwarted love interest (Beatrice), miscommunications that keep the two main characters apart, step-by-step instruction from Benedict on how to discover Claude’s inspiration to improve his paintings all combine to bring this story to its rather predictable conclusion.

After four chapters, there’s no story progression other than there’s a genius artist who has no real “soul” in his artwork and a genius photographer (the love interest), who’s helping him find his motivation. The step-by-step instruction of how to ‘find the real you’ so you can add meaning to your artwork from Benedict quickly made me lose interest as I read. This part could’ve been glossed over while the storyline was taken further, but that, unfortunately, didn’t happen.

There’s no real plot to speak of and not enough story to keep the reader interested. The art style is uninspiring to me, but I could overlook that if there was something else to make me care about the characters. There are several things of interest that are never explained, things that aren’t a real part of the story that are over-explained and loose ends with the secondary characters that, in my opinion, would’ve made the story more well-rounded if it had been included.

The main premise to this story has been done so many times before with a few changes here and there. There’s not anything new to keep a reader turning the pages. I can’t recommend anyone buy this.