Guest Post & Review: Back to You by Natalie-Nicole Bates

Title: Back to You
Author: Natalie-Nicole Bates

Summary: On the surface, Lynsey Reznor seems to have it all. She is beautiful, brilliant, and a successful true-crime writer who has been living the past decade in Miami. But what Lynsey lacks is what she needs the most—a family.

After the death of her mother, and yet another failed relationship, Lynsey makes an impulsive decision to return to her hometown of Unity. But Unity will present its own bittersweet memories, most notably, her first love, Nick Lincoln.

Twenty years ago, Nick broke teenager Lynsey’s heart when he decided to marry another. He had his own private reasons—reasons he never explained to Lynsey. Now she is back, along with a chance to reclaim her love. But Lynsey wants answers from him that he may never be able to give out of duty and guilt.



Natalie-Nicole Bates has been kind enough to let us read and review her book, Back to You on her blog tour. Today she has brought us an interview with her main character, Lynsey Reznor.


Today I’m pleased to get a chance to visit with my heroine, Lynsey Reznor, from my contemporary romance Back To You. Lynsey is going is going to talk a bit about her reasons for leaving Unity when she was a teenager.

NNB: Lynsey, thank you for agreeing to talk about your early years in Unity. Can you tell me about your life before you left at sixteen?

LR: Well, the only family I had was my mother. My father died when I was young—I don’t remember him. I had a normal childhood, I guess. My mother was always there for me. I loved her tremendously.

NNB: I understand you have always been a whip-smart cookie!

LR: I suppose so. I skipped over two grades, so I was actually sixteen in my senior year of high school.

NNB: When you were sixteen, you were offered a scholarship to a school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Did you feel torn between accepting the scholarship and staying on in Unity?

LR: Sixteen was a difficult age for me. I developed a crush on my best friend Suzy’s brother, Nick. I thought he liked me as well, but…he chose to peruse a relationship with another girl.

NNB: That must have hurt very much.

LR: My first love, my first heartbreak. It caused me to rebound to another guy.

NNB: Caleb Smith?

LR: Yes, Caleb. A decent guy, but he pressured me for a commitment I wasn’t ready for.

NNB: So you fled Unity?

LR: Pretty much. But I certainly don’t regret it. I even stayed on in Switzerland an additional four years. I feel quite grateful to have been able to travel and be educated in Europe. My French became fluid and effortless, and I learned to ski. All in all, a great life experience.

NNB: I heard there was also a romance with an Olympic ice hockey player?

LR: Ah…Jean-Luc. How I did enjoy my time with him. But the relationship ran in its course. We do remain friends to this day. He’s a coach with an NHL team now. Every time his team came to Florida we always would get together for dinner and speak to each other in nothing but French. He is still the smoothest man I’ve ever known.

NNB: Sounds like fun. Do you miss Miami yet?

LR: Not really. Like my time with Jean-Luc, my time in Miami was great while it lasted, but a thing of the past nonetheless. I am happy, excited, and looking forward to returning to my hometown of Unity.

NNB: Much luck, Lynsey, I wish you nothing but the best and I hope you find everything you are looking for in Unity.

Read more about Lynsey and her life in Unity in Back To You, available now at Bradley Publishing!

Back to you is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bradley Publishing.

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Review: This book, if anything, was a short story. I’m really disappointed in reading this novel and I almost wish that I hadn’t. It’s not because of the fact that it was a bad novel, although it really had its dull moments. The thing that I disliked about this ‘novel’ more than anything was that it had the potential to be a really, really amazing novel, but it fell so very short of its potential.

Back to You started off right with plot line, and while that could be alright in most books, it wasn’t okay in this one. The plot line started off and we knew nothing about the characters, but then all of a sudden we were learning everything about the characters and yet we were learning nothing of intense importance. It was important to learn that Nick had lost his wife, and it was important to learn why Lynsey had moved back to her hometown, Unity, but we didn’t learn things that were actually potentially important about the characters. It took halfway into the book for me to learn exactly what type of writing Lynsey did and when the author initially mentioned that there was a ‘new division’ in Unity, I thought it meant her job, not a housing division.

In addition to that, everyone and their mother was a cop. Street cop, detective, sergeant. Every single guy that was interested in Lynsey had or was in the police force one way or another. The town didn’t seem that big of a town either, so it made absolutely no sense that three people that she’d initially known since childhood were in the police force and then there was another man who she knew from somewhere else who was also in the force. It felt like an overdose of police and it made me wonder if anyone else in the town did anything other than work for the police.

For a novel that wasn’t even 30,000 words, it had a surprising amount of insignificant detail. I mean, it was a great concept to have our Mary Sue (Lynsey) visit her injured friend, Evan (another of the males who was not only on the police force but was also after her), but there was absolutely nothing about Suzy’s divorce that had any relevance to the novel. I breezed through this, mainly looking for a reason to get it done and over with.

Between the bad quality of the PDF (putting the PDF on my Kindle completely ruined the formatting and made it difficult to read) and the downright ridiculousness of the concept of four guys hunting after a girl who clearly had her heart set on the man she’d been in love with since she was sixteen, I felt like I was reading a bad soap opera. Nick and Lynsey exchanged these little sentences that ended or started with words like ‘sweetheart’, ‘honey’ and ‘my angel’ which made it so very obvious that they were meant for each other at the beginning of the novel. And the attempt at sex scenes in here… It was like watching a car crash; terrible, horrible, but unable to look away for fear of missing something important to write about in the review.

Overall, I managed to finish the novel, so I didn’t despise it, but it really could have been something had the author actually sat down and gone over this with some thought and edited it a heck of a lot more. Back to You had the potential to be an amazing novel, but instead it was just a boring, lukewarm short story that made me want to fall asleep rather than read it.

Rating: ★★ 2/5 Stars