He has a good body – he’s a surfer: of course he has a good body, but he has freckles everywhere and “sandy lank hair” and ears that stick out. Ryan is also unusual in that he’s not drop dead gorgeous. (He got a job and he moved on – that’s why I particularly noticed that Carly (with the exception of her relationship with Ryan) didn’t.) Considering that for most of the book he was clueless about what made Carly so skittish (and, while he wasn’t a bully or pushy, he wasn’t what I’d call sensitive either – at least in terms of sex) he was certainly very patient with her emotions – to the extent that on one of their first dates she spends a lot of it sobbing in his arms.
But, I liked that he turned his life around and it was clear he wasn’t going back to jail. While it wasn’t a violent crime he was put away for, I wonder if some readers may find his criminal past makes it difficult to warm to him. When we meet him, he’s just got out of jail. And, when push comes to shove, he chooses Carly over everyone else. However, there was one wonderful scene (involving a discussion about tattoos) which showed he was absolutely gone over Carly. The story is told from Carly’s first person POV and Ryan isn’t a big talker, so I did feel that I didn’t get enough of him. She has very interesting reasoning for not telling anyone and for not reporting it, which felt authentic but at the same time, it left her dealing (or not dealing as the case may be) with an horrendous trauma completely alone. Carly got no treatment, no counselling – it seems she wasn’t even tested for STD’s.
Even by the end of the book, there is really only a fairly brief discussion with Ryan (and, while he loves and accepts her, he possibly did not articulate what she needed to hear – but then, what do I know, I’ve not been sexually assaulted). What bothered me, both in terms of the book and for Carly, is that she didn’t talk to anyone about it. She feels rage and emptiness and overwhelming shame. Her only happiness was in surfing, where she could get away from herself and not feel empty or awful anymore. After being sexually assaulted during “schoolies week” (I think in the US many teens go to Florida to celebrate the end of school – here they go to the Gold Coast in Queensland) after she finished high school, she withdrew from her family and friends, dropped out of university, moved from the Central Coast of New South Wales to Manly and lived only to surf.
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