Title: White Hot
Author: Sandra Brown
Date finished: 4/23/16
Genre: Fiction, romantic suspense
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 2004
Pages in book: 419
Stand alone or series: Stand alone
Where I got the book from: Amazon – purchased
Blurb from the cover:
When she hears that her younger brother Danny has committed suicide, Sayre Lynch relents from a vow never to return to Destiny, her small Louisiana hometown. Planning to leave immediately after the funeral, Sayre instead finds herself drawn into the web cast by Huff Hoyle, her controlling and tyrannical father, who owns the town’s sole industry and, with her older brother, runs the lives of everyone who lives there. But underneath the Hoyles’ rigid control, trouble is brewing. Old hatreds foster plans for revenge, past crimes resurface, and a maverick deputy sheriff determines that Danny’s death was not suicide. Tensions mount, threatening to ignite a powder keg of long-held hostility.
My rating: 4.0 stars out of a scale of 5
My review: This book will count towards my Book Riot 2016 Read Harder reading challenge, marking off the “read a book that was adapted into a movie, then watch the movie and debate which was better” since that is exactly what I did. So if you read my blog you know that overall I am definitely a fan of Sandra Brown. Her novels are always enthralling, drawing me in from the first page. I try to only read her books on my days off or vacation days because I know once I start reading it I won’t be able to put it down. So when I saw that one of her books was being made into a movie on the Hallmark channel, well my gosh I was ecstatic. Unfortunately I don’t get the specific channel on my house that it was being aired on, but luckily my mom does and was nice enough to tape it for me! I finished the book Saturday and then watched the movie. The book (and the movie) are about the Hoyle family and all their drama. The book is full of revenge, deception, murder, and ultimately some romance.
Overall I liked this book a lot. I don’t think it was one of my favorites of Brown’s but as always she crafts a masterful story. There aren’t many authors that I read where there are plot twists that I don’t see coming but Brown always seems to catch me unaware. While I really liked the book, the movie just did not hold up to what I expected after reading the book. There were so many plot points from the book that didn’t make it into the movie that it almost would have been better had I watched the movie without ever reading the book. It was pretty much 2 different stories. I was really disappointed how different Sayre was in the book and the movie. In the book she was portrayed as this bad-ass red head who had survived a lot to become the successful person she was today. But the Sayre from the movie pretty much just cried all the whole time, it was awful. I was so much looking forward to the movie version of a good book but I ended up just being disappointed.
The bottom line: This was a great read. There were definitely some plot twists I did not see coming and the ending was what I wanted though it was slightly abrupt. The movie honestly was such a let down. It was almost nothing like the book, while most of the words were similar they were told in a different location and in a different order and some of the plot points are just completely skewed and half of them are missing. I would recommend the book definitely but would probably say skip the movie.
Click on the cover to go to the book’s Amazon page
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