Although Completely by Ruthie Knox is billed as a romance, it is more of a work of women’s literature. There is a romance between the main characters, Kal and Rosemary, however, it is secondary to the other major events and issues in their lives.

Divorced and estranged from her daughter, Rosemary is focused on her childhood dream of being a mountaineer. The beautiful Brit meets Kal at base camp on Mount Everest. Kal is the ruggedly handsome, Sherpa Ice Doctor—his role is to “diagnose” the condition of the ice for the climbers. Culturally, Kal and Rosemary are miles apart, but an avalanche literally throws them into each other’s arms.

These two characters are very interesting. They are both outwardly strong and calm, but they are emotionally fragile beings. I loved the messages Ms. Knox conveys through her development of these two characters. Kal and Rosemary are both lost and looking for purpose. Rosemary spent years feeling like nothing. She was unappreciated by her husband and daughter, and she was made to feel that she was loved only when she made the proper decisions. Kal spent years being abused by his father, and watching his father beat his mother. He also spent his adulthood wondering if the stories of his mother’s involvement in his father’s death were true. Their issues are quite different, but they both on Mount Everest avoiding their issues and hiding from life instead of living it.

Rosemary and Kal are thrown together multiple times as they recover from shock and reenter life. They end up taking care of one another. While I usually abhor “insta-love” stories, I can accept the all-too-quick use of the term love between Kal and Rosemary given the life-changing catastrophe they experienced together. Living through an avalanche, would definitely make me appreciate the fragility of my life and heighten my awareness of the limited time we have to seize the day.

I appreciated that both Kal and Rosemary question their fit in each other’s life—even more so after their declaration of love. They are both struggling with what they want to do with the rest of their lives, and they are trying to envision how they might accomplish anything while being tethered in a relationship. Kal’s mother, the infamous Yangchen Beckett, is the catalyst for change in both Kal and Rosemary. The two find new inspiration for moving forward individually, and they find that they can love and be loved completely if they live by their own rules.

The moral of this story is don’t compromise on finding fulfillment in your life in order to have love…find a partner who will love you completely while you are following your dream. Think outside the box, and love outside the box.

I love Ruthie Knox! This is the third book in the New York trilogy but it is a complete standalone. In fact, each of these books are standalone and only loosely connected. Her characters are fascinating with so many layers and this book is truly completely that way! When I started this book, I had to remind myself that Ruthie Knox does not write pretty formulaic romances. Her stories are deep and thoughtful, so unusual that I often wish more books were like this! This story is of Rosemary, a divorcee, who is trying to find herself by climbing Mt Everest. Kal is is a Sherpa from Queens, NY but is on the mountain at the same time as Rosemary. There is an avalanche and the story takes off! I do not even want to try to describe this book other than to say if you want a smart, very well written romance that will envelope you and make you never want to leave “Ruthie Knox World”, this is the book for you. I wish I could portray better how much I adore this book. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this book for an honest review.

I really liked the first 2 books in the series but this one felt really disconnected to me. The first two had a thread that connected the books to the city and a flavor to them that felt very present in the city. But Completely was a total different kind of book with it starting literally on Everest and never really getting off that mountain. For me I felt like the setting could never really get past that. I never connected with either character and when we finally got how the heroine was actually connected to the first two books it was so far into the book that I couldn't bring myself to care about that where normally I would be like ohhh yay! This book was just not for me.

What I’m Talking About:

Like the rest of Knox’s New York Trilogy, Completely doesn’t fall into a tidy classification. More than the others, however, it wants to tip over into the dreaded women’s fiction category. I think Knox has earned it this time, and I didn’t like it as much as the two (three) previous books being Truly, Madly, and the related About Last Night.

About Last Night is probably my favorite book Knox has written so it pleases me that she’s chosen to return to the Chamberlain family with the New York Trilogy and not with the focus on characters one might expect. Many authors just run through the siblings of a family in a series whereas Knox gives more emphasis to their love stories through the women in their lives. In Completely, Knox focuses on Rosemary Chamberlain, Winston Chamberlain’s (Madly) ex-wife. Winston is the older brother of Neville in About Last Night.

Rosemary led a tidy, scheduled, polite existence as Winston’s wife, but that’s all she was doing, existing. She describes herself as “wallpaper.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but in Completely she struggles to find herself and stumbles upon love in the process. Unfortunately, it is not as compelling of a read as Knox’s previous books because it starts with a character who is neither likable nor unlikable. Through shared tragedy she falls in love with a man who works very hard at being desperately private. As a result, there’s not much for the reader to relate to in either character. I found it difficult to invest myself. Like its predecessor Madly, the characters don’t seem to go together, maybe even less so. With a spread of seven years between them, not as many as between Winston and Allie, Rosemary is the older of the two. No one would mistake her for a cougar. Rather, she’s a proper, British, would-be baroness. Kalden Beckett, her love interest, describes himself as “brown.” It’s meant as a skin color reference having a Tibetan mother and an American father, being born in New York, but spending a lot of time in Nepal as well. Like Rosemary’s wallpaper label, it seems more designed to make him blend in with his surroundings, which in his case is dirt and trees. Getting to know them both literally takes the entire book.

One of my favorite characters is peripheral, like Allie’s father Bill was in Madly. Kal’s mother Yangchen is loosely based on Lhakpa Sherpa, the world record holding climber who has summitted Mount Everest eight times.

Knox has written Yangchen as the type of woman who with different circumstances would have been the CEO of a major corporation. Instead she runs multiple family businesses and the lives of her family. Personally, I like her better this way. It makes her much more interesting. Probably not unlike a CEO, the time spent keeping so many balls in the air makes it difficult to have close relationships. It would be easy to say her relationships were distant, but Kal showcases Knox’s craftsmanship with words as he describes his relationship with his mother, “He doubted she’d be worried. They were like house cats most of the time. They did their own thing, left the occasional dead bird of love on each other’s doormats.”

Unlike her previous books, Completely lacks the big twist at the end, but Knox does not leave us hanging. The story does come to a satisfactory ending and includes a cute epilogue. Knox continues to be a go-to author for me and even though this is my not favorite offering, I appreciate her writing style and will definitely read what comes next!

My Rating: B+ Liked It A Lot

I did not finish this book. Slow pace. Could not get into characters

3 stars. This book was only okay for me. This book is about a Kal and Rosemary. Kal is working at an ice doctor as a favor to a friend on Mount Everest. Rosemary is a well-to-do British lady with big plans to climb the 7 highest mountains in the world and write a book about it. She is climbing Everest for the first time when there is an avalanche. Rosemary gets to safety, but many are killed. She meets Kal and they come together to comfort each other in their shock and grief. They find they have a connection and they end up spending time together after the disaster, which leads to them falling for each other. But they lead very different lives from each other. They have no idea how to merge their lives or if they even can, which leads to some drama, but they manage to work it out somehow in the end.

I didn't really enjoy this book for the most part. There were many depressing parts and much of the book was slow. The characters were pretty bland and wishy washy with their feelings. Kal and Rosemary were only okay for me. They spent entirely too much time in their heads. I was frustrated by their behavior. Both were so calm and polite with no strong emotions or drive to put forth effort to be together. The ending is very open ended with them together in spirit but apart most of the time in body. The Everest climbing aspect and the Sherpa part was very interesting. I appreciate that it must have needed a lot of research to write about so in depth. I did think the book read more like women's fiction than romance. But the writing was very good. I just wasn't my personal taste. While I have enjoyed some of this author's books, the last few I have read were disappointing. I don't think that this author is for me.

This is the third book in the New York series and I've read the previous two. That said, this was my least favorite. I had a feeling of angst throughout the entire story,with just a few spots of happy. I liked the idea of the book, but there was too much insecurity and unhappiness for me.

Hard one for me to review so I'm going to do a good/not so good list.

Good - writing is clear, concise, and informational. Character development is strong. I felt like I knew Kal and Rosemary very well. A unique storyline made it very interesting..

Not so good for me- Pace of the story was very slow leaving way too much time for my mind to wonder rather than grabbing and holding my attention. Information overload! While it was nice to have some background on Kal I learned more about extreme mountain climbing than I ever wanted to know. For a romance I found that part of the story lacking.

So overall this is a very well done book and if you are interested in summit climbing, you'll probably really enjoy it. If you're looking for a strong romance this may not be for you.

This is a different kind of romance for me. It is extremely intense not only in the relationship between Kal and Rosemary but intense in their life struggle. They are both searching for who they are, what they are meant to be and what to do with their futures.

Rosemary was lost in her marriage. She is now determined to climb the Seven Summits and write about her adventures. It’s her plan. She counts every step, every breath, every heartbeat. When a natural disaster diverts her plan, the struggle to find herself returns with a vengeance.

Kal has failed at too many things in life. He had plans. He had aspirations. Not only has he failed those around him, he has failed himself. Resenting those that use Mount Everest as a way to feed their megalomania he struggles to protect the mountain. And again he has failed.

When these two connect there is obvious chemistry but their lives will never sync. He cannot embrace the climber and she has set her sights on reaching the summit.

This book has a lot of information about Everest, the regions around it, the Nepalese people and the effects tourism and teams of climbers have on them. While much of that was interesting, I found myself skimming through some of it. Nevertheless, I found myself really enjoying this couple’s story through much of the book. However, when it got closer to the end I just felt like it lost some of its spark and life. It dragged and I realized I needed something to alleviate the heaviness of it all.

There is much here in regards to the empowerment of women. I know it’s not politically correct, especially being a woman, but I felt like it was too much. And that’s where this was a different kind of romance for me. The message here was about being true to yourself, standing tall as a woman, remaining strong in the face of adversity. I didn’t mind the message. I just wanted a little more romance to go with it.

This is an honest review of an advanced copy provided by NetGalley

Dual POV
Safe
No apparent triggers

An avalanche sets in motion an offbeat romance…

This is the third book in the New York series that can be read as a stand-alone.

The heroine is the ex-wife of the hero from the previous book. Rosemary Chamberlain is thirty-nine, British, an author and mother of a nineteen year old daughter she’s estranged from. After her divorce she’d left to find herself forgetting the emotional needs of the child she’d left behind. She’d lost herself in the marriage and is starting out life again with an adventure, climbing the seven tallest mountains in the world with some likeminded women. She has a strong feminist outlook and an unconscious desire to prove her self-worth. The climb to each level of Mount Everest is a grueling physical exertion that erases everything from the mind except for survival of the current moment and then the next, a true exercise in endurance. Nearing the highest reaches of the mountain an avalanche engulfs the base camp below and halts climber progress, disaster protocol has everyone evacuated off the mountain. The visuals on the way down, the deaths of people she’d come to know sent her into shock and brought on a desire to feel alive that a sexy handsome guide who is also feeling the losses helps her with.

As the son of an American and a Nepalese Sherpa woman who’d climbed Mount Everest seven times after her husband’s death, Kalden Beckett is no stranger to the mountain but not as a climber, as an ice doctor and a guide who tries to convince people not to climb earning him the morbid nickname Doctor Doom. There’s a tragic history surrounding his family that few know of, he’s thirty-two and has seen the deaths of climbers and their assisting Sherpas attributable to the mountain too often. When there’s a resounding crack in the night, a sound all too familiar, he knows it signaled an avalanche and does his job keeping people calm and helping the necessary egress. One woman draws his eye, he knows the emotional turmoil she’ll soon face as the shock eases and he keeps an eye on her well-being. What he failed to consider was the backlash he would also suffer from and so two witnesses to nature’s destructive power find more than a measure of comfort in each other.

This time the author gave us two protagonists who are the walking wounded, each trying to find their way forward in life having gone about it all wrong and failed the first time, neither had yet to recover. These two needed to learn to be true to themselves but it took something larger than life, a disaster of epic proportions to mortal humans, the real possibility of death and the connection made to a stranger that lingers to awaken the desire for more out of their lives, event forced introspection can be a potent thing. With each other they unexpectedly found the spark of life they’d been missing but they are from such different worlds and had to face their most painful inner truths. Can they let themselves go for it completely? The woman being that much older than the man is not my favorite of tropes, hard for me to buy into yet it worked here, age truly didn’t matter considering everything else they dealt with, though in the long term it could be an issue.

This book was not as captivating or humorous as the first two books and moved slowly but it was an interesting psychological study of two very different individuals, this author shows us human nature in its rawest and realest form. The plot was darker or rather I should say it’s sadder than the others in this series and contains emotional triggers of abuse. It was nice to see the cast from the previous books, these two fit in quite well amongst those endearing misfit couples.

An advanced reading copy was obtained from the publisher via NetGalley.

see goodreads review

I was completely disillusioned by Rosemary. As an aspiring author hoping to ascend the Seven Summits, Rosemary should have been one amazing chick. Instead, she was an entitled, closed off, brittle woman who seemed to have nothing to offer except her beauty and money.

I was completely fooled by Kal. At first, I was so excited about the prospect of a Sherpa hero. Kal is young, smart, kind, and, best of all, from Queens. But just when it seems he'll be the guy to wake up ice princess Rosemary, Kal starts to fall apart from his own internal demons.

I completely enjoyed the opening of the book but wished for so much more as it unraveled. At times, this felt more like women's fiction than romance. I wanted more enlightenment for Rosemary, more understanding between her and her daughter Beatrice, and a heck lot less of Rosemary's ex-husband and his assorted relations. As much as I loved Ruthie Knox's About Last Night, I never wanted to explore the lives of Neville's brother and former sister-in-law.

The author is very talented and gave a fascinating blend of mountain climbing, gender roles, and NYC; unfortunately the remaining story about Rosemary and Kal and their constant internal whining left me nonplussed.

2.5 stars

When I saw the next book in Knox's series available from Netgalley I just requested without reading the blurb. Her writing has a way of wrapping around your heart and not letting go. It's also an education about New York, beautiful pieces tucked away with restaurants and history, places I'd love to visit if possible. It starts off on Mt. Everest as Rosemary nears the summit and we're caught up in a fantastic adventure. Rosemary, mother of Beatrice and ex-wife of Winston, needed to be herself. From Winston's book we viewed her as this selfish person, finally getting the chance to be free of her ex and her daughter and her parental responsibilities. Now we get to see the real Rosemary and what she's fighting for. Kal, her love interest and Sherpa, is an intriguing man with a large family and even larger heart. He lives for his family and the caring of others, especially the Sherpa giving their lives so people can reach the top. Kal and Rosemary may have seemed like complete opposites but they worked in every way. This is not just a simple romance where two people meet in a dire situation and fall for each other in a fit of adrenaline. Each book in the New York series is a standalone but are interconnected with May and Allie as sisters and Rosemary as the ex of Allie's boyfriend. They will mingle and get involved in each other's lives but each story can be read alone.

Third in the New York series, COMPLETELY voices Rosemary Chamberlain’s story starting off with her attempt to climb Mount Everest which goes horribly wrong. Guide Kal Beckett rescues Rosemary and her team after an avalanche, placing them on a trek of a transforming kind. After a night of life reaffirming passion, Rosemary and Kal become a team in a different sort of way on the complicated trip back to their respective families in New York. Rosemary ran away from a marriage after feeling her role in life had been that of being only “wallpaper,” as if she was living her life for everyone but herself. When what Rosemary thought she wanted from life takes a near deadly turn, she must reassess everything. Kal is the son of a famous Sherpa mother who climbed Everest seven times; her part is based on a true story. He had an even more famous brutal father, now dead. He has been struggling to find his own way while straddling the two very different worlds of New York and Nepal. Everything Kal thought he wanted to accomplish such as helping Sherpas make a living wage has not worked out leaving him feeling frustrated and lost. These two seemingly very opposite people develop a relationship, falling in love despite the appropriately mountainous odds.

Whenever I read a Ruthie Knox story, I know there will be intelligent skilled writing, interesting and often quirky characters, steamy romance, and clever humor. Her characters are frequently deep into self-examination reminding me of Socrates, and later, Thoreau’s quote about the unexamined life being not worth living. They do quite a lot of examining which provides some humorous situations for the folks going through their life challenges. Rosemary and Kal’s story feels the most intense of the trilogy with perhaps less comedy and more angst. Bringing together people from her extended family who feature in the earlier stories some of whom, including Rosemary, were first introduced in ABOUT LAST NIGHT, a sort of prequel to this series, their relationship exemplifies some of the complex challenges that blended families face in a multi-generational way. Rosemary’s prickly relationship with her daughter, Beatrice, plays a center role in that complexity.

Love conquers all including mountains real and imagined; however, hard work and understanding one’s essential self plays a very important part for two people who need help letting go of their collective emotional baggage. Rosemary and Kal have quite the emotional expedition ahead of them, but everything to gain by getting it right. This story can be read as a standalone, but to understand Rosemary’s actions in particular, knowing her background and ex-husband’s story enriches and adds depth to the experience.

Wow was this story emotional! I just could not put it down. In book 2 of the New York series, Madly, we met Rosemary Chamberlain, mom to Beatrice and ex-wife to Winston. Now Rosemary is back for her own story.

After Rosemary divorced Winston so she could "find" herself again, she joined a group of other British women to climb the Seven Summits - the highest mountains on each of the seven continents. The first one she was tackling was Everest. While on Everest, an avalanche hits and Rosemary is rescued by one of the guides, Kalden Beckett....who happens to be very handsome and the son of the most famous female climber, Yangchen Beckett. After the emotional rescue, Rosemary ends up spending the night with Kal and is thrown for a loop. Rosemary has never felt such a strong connection to someone before. The two of them travel together to New York from Nepal and start to quickly have feelings for each other. Rosemary is conflicted between wanting to be with Kal and wanting to find herself. Just when Rosemary thinks she has her life figured out, everything changes.

Rosemary was a determined character. She knew what she wanted, but didn't truly understand what that really was. Kal didn't really know what he wanted, but because of things from his past, he tended to just ignore everything. Together they both were able to finally figure out what they each really wanted. I loved how Kal was younger than Rosemary...it added a little something to the story. I also really enjoyed the path these two went on to get to their happy ending, but boy was it really emotional! If you cry easy, have tissues close at hand toward the end of the book! Overall, this was a great, emotional read!

Maybe 2.5 stars? Maybe not. I just didn't love this. In fact, I really didn't like most of it. And it's killing me to say that cause I've loved Ruthie Knox's work before.

In here we have Rosemary and Kal who meet on the side of Mt Everest in an avalanche. He kind of rescues her as she's trying to reach the top. They form a bond due to both surviving their circumstances. They spend an amazing night together as the adrenaline comes down that neither really remember the next day. They travel to New York (his hometown, her to see her teenage daughter) and spend the next five days falling in love. Both are reconsidering the path their lives should take after this trauma.

I don't know. I think maybe it felt preachy to me because Rosemary was all for feminism and empowering women and changing her plan from summiting the highest mountains on each continent to wanting to write about women who have done amazing things. Her daughter that she goes to Wisconsin to see needs a good spanking. Rosemary just survived an avalanche and the daughter is snippy and rude and wouldn't answer her mom's texts or phone calls and couldn't find it necessary to stop what she was doing to go to New York to see her before she went home to England. Rosemary traveled to Wisconsin to her. UMMMM, NO. Sure, Bea was making a film, but it was backed by her family's investments. They would have understood her seeing her mom. The only good thing about the trip to Wisconsin is that we got to see the Frederick family (the heroines from the first books in the series) and that is what I enjoyed the most.

Notice I haven't talked about Kal much. It's because he was kind of just wallpaper...and if you read the book, you'll get that ;) He faded into the background even though he went through the same thing as Rosemary and had huge life decisions to make as well.

Will my disappointment keep me from reading more from Ruthie? Of course not! Not every book an author writes can be loved by all people. I'm sure others will totally love this one. It just didn't work for me.

*thanks to the publisher for sharing a copy of this with me*

I loved the previous book and was really excited to read this one when I learned that it will be about Winston's ex wife. We rarely get romances with older women (she is 39) and I was looking forward to see how her second chance romance was handled. Sadly, this book did not work for me as well I expected. There are some things I liked about the story and the characters but the things that bothered me outnumber them.

This is a kind of opposites attract story, where she is white, older, richer, determined to find a new direction in life, while he is of mixed origin (white/Sherpa), a bit lost and directionless after having given up on his dreams.

They meet and come together under very dramatic circumstances, surviving an avalanche in the en route to mount Everest. It affects them deeper than anyone of them thinks initially and brings them very close together in a very short amount of time. But real life is not that simple and they have to face all the challenges it poses to them actually being together in the long term.

I loved all the tidbits on Everest and Nepal, Nepalese culture, the whole climber's/Sherpa's world we get to see in this story. They did give us a rich background into Kal's (and his family) world.

Still, I felt the story is very much focused on Rosemary and her journey to her new, post-divorce self. her personal struggles overshadowed to romance. As a whole it was Rosemary and the other women (her daughter, Kal's mother, May and Allie's mother) who were at the centre of this story and not the love between her and Kal. I would have loved to see more of the main characters together, working out their issues, overcoming their pasts and exploring their growing feelings for each other.

That said I liked a lot of things about Rosemary. She has a complicated past that has shaped her, wants desperately find herself, to get her life back in track. She acts like an ice queen on the surface, she is very human on the inside, dealing with her own fears and insecurities. She seems to be goign in the wrong direction for most of the story, trying to make a clean break with the past only to come to realise that this is not possible, your past is part of you, it shaped who you are today and can help you become a better person in the future, avoiding the mistakes you have already made.

I found Kal rather interesting but sadly his character' arc felt very underdeveloped to me. He came second to the women in the book and we only got to see bits and pieces of his personality and the motivations behind his actions.

The i-love-yous were a bit sudden, too flashy and they didn't have me convinced of the depth of feelings between the hero and heroine. Overall, I was very underwhelmed with the romance aspect of the story.

My biggest issue beside the ones pointed above, is the white saviour narrative I read into the relationship between Rosemary and Kal's mother. I got the impression it was all about the personal fulfillment and professional success of the white woman who managed to convince the troubled and misunderstood WOC to let her tell her story to the world. And this all didn't sit well with me at all.

Overall, after loving Madly so much (it's one of the best romances I've read in 2017 so far) and generally being a fan of this author's work, I found Completely rather a let-down. I expected a lot more from it but ended up not enjoying it as much as I wanted to.

3.5 stars
Ruthie Knox writes an intense story about two people who live through a trauma and it frees them in the moment. The coupling and coming together is a reaffirming of life... of being alive... and then the story takes off from there.

It was lovely returning to Knox's writing again, and while I liked this one, ultimately something was missing -- in the romance, the characters -- that just left me underwhelmed and wanting *more*.



~ * ~ * ~

I'll be discussing it more in the next Whatcha Reading podcast, which will go up on TBQ's Book Palace this Saturday (9/9)

This book was a hard one for me to really like. Rosemary and Kal meet on Mt. Everest where he is a Sherpa. Rosemary and a group of women have made it their mission to climb the mountain and 6 more in order to document their journey. They do not seem to respect Rosemary and think she doesn't belong in their group.

Rosemary is still trying to find herself after divorcing Winston and acts like a dysfunctional person at times. She flits around trying not to think about her own life failures or what she wants in order to be happy. Instead she uses Kal as a distraction and then brings him along on her path of trying to regain her balance.

Kal was a strong advocate of shutting down Everest and unionizing the Sherpa's as a whole. He knows that their economy would greatly benefit from a change and that they could also provide an eco benefit by limiting the number of climbers, etc. His dreams shatter in front of him and he feels as hopeless and despondent as Rosemary. He goes along with her because something about her draws him in.

Rosemary is the older woman in this story but she acted like the younger one. She wanted to provoke Kal but didn't like it when the tables were turned. She wanted to determine where they were going, who they were going to see and didn't even bother asking him if he wanted to do any of it. In fact, she knew at times he was unhappy with what they were doing but decided her wants were more important. She was pretty selfish most of this book and I had a hard time connecting with her. Her relationship with Beatrice was rocky at best. She wanted Beatrice to be glad she survived the avalanche but didn't want to own up to her abandonment of her. Rosemary, again, thought she knew what was best for everyone and turned out she was wrong again.

Kal and Rosemary definitely had a rocky start. Their age difference, the fact they were a bi-racial couple and were coming at life from different angles didn't help matters. Rosemary needed to "grow up" for most of this book and it was kind of redundant the number of times she had an excuse for her bad behavior. I did like how she finally came around to understand that she needed to work on herself but it took Kal spelling out some hard truths for her to see it. She wanted to push him but didn't like it when he pushed back.

Overall it was an okay read. The ending still left me with some unanswered questions and seemed kind of slapped together. I received an ARC from NetGalley for my honest review.