With You Always by Rena Olsen is one of my anticipated reads for this month & I was so excited to be reading it with @avidreaderdiary. I absolutely loved The Girl Before by Rena Olsen! It became one of my top recommendations & I was going in with high hopes.
Finished this book within a few hours, it was like any other domestic thriller where the guy pretends to be the Prince Charming a girl has been waiting for (insta-love) & reveals his true colors later on but it was a good one, with a different plot in terms of the Church.
The book itself was shorter compared to other thrillers I’ve read & is told from the girl’s point of view. Wasn’t as incredible as The Girl Before though!

3 1/2 ⭐️‘S
While this was a well written book by Olsen, it was not quite as suspenseful as I would have liked and fairly predictable. The first half was much slower paced, but by the second half pages were turning at a much more rapid pace. It felt like a few pieces were missing from Bryce’s earlier life and the ending felt a bit rushed, but still an overall enjoyable read.

I loved "The Girl Before" so was eager to pick this one up, but I was very disappointed. I almost DNF this one, but I skimmed the last 40% to see if the ending could redeem it.

Unfortunately, I just found this one very cliche and for me, it was not believable. Bryce was SO over the top & all the going-ons of the church were so shady, yet Julia couldn't get a clue? Of course, that's the storyline but again, it was just overdone and not done well. The main character was an extremely weak protagonist and I don't find myself enjoying those types of novels. I was hoping she'd sort of "take charge" and fight back the last 1/3 of the book. I don't want to give anything away but I even felt like the ending was a cop-out. I would not recommend this one, especially if you read a lot of suspense/thrillers- it felt very stale to me.

With You Always is the story of Julia and Bryce - a couple who meet by the chance of fate and have a whirlwind romance. By all appearances, Bryce is the perfect man - handsome, wealthy, charming - but is there more than meets the eye? In this story of a woman who gets wrapped up in a Scientology-Esque cult with an awful man, the story is really just that. The writing is great, however, the story bored me honestly and felt incredibly predictable. I was expecting more of a thriller and this one was more a bad lifetime movie.

With You Always by Rena Olsen: I really wanted to like this book. However, right from the beginning I could tell it was going to be another girl meets great guy, then guy becomes horrible, twisted, controlling, you name it. This tale has been told a thousand different times, in a thousand different ways, but always ends up being the same. Had to quit reading about a third of the way through.

Rena Olsen’s début novel, The Girl Before, was one of my favorite mysteries of 2017, so I'm sure you can imagine how delighted I was to learn she had a new book coming out. It was something I knew I had to read, so when I saw that With You Always was available for review, I snapped it up as quickly as I could.

Julia is finding life to be a bit of a struggle. She just went through an extremely painful breakup, and she doesn't feel her job is the best fit for her. She has a great support system made up of her parents, sister, and a group of friends she made in college, and yet, she feels strangely alone.

A chance meeting with Bryce changes everything. He's unbelievably good-looking, charming, confident, and he seems interested in her. One date leads to two then three, and before long, Julia is convinced she's met the one man who can make her life good again.

Bryce is a very religious man, and for Julia - who has never considered herself to be particularly spiritual - this is a difficult thing. Bryce wants to be with someone who shares his faith, so Julia needs to figure her own beliefs out quickly. Fortunately, Bryce is part of a close-knit church community, and Julia is immediately welcomed into their fold. It doesn't take long for her to feel that the church is the answer to everything that's gone wrong in her life, and she becomes a willing participant in their services.

Unfortunately, Julia's family and friends don't seem nearly as enamored of Bryce as she is, and Julia begins to feel torn between them and the man she loves. She wants the people in her life to warm up to Bryce, but when that doesn't happen, she starts to distance herself from them, figuring Bryce and the church are all the support she really needs. Bryce is incredibly supportive of her choice, and Julia becomes even more dependent on him than she was before.

I could tell right away that something wasn't quite right about Bryce, because he seemed a little too polished and perfect to be real. I wanted Julia to pick up on these things as well, but she's completely under his spell. At first, I held out hope that her sister or one of her friends could talk some sense into her, but it soon became obvious that Bryce intended to isolate Julia from everyone and everything that wasn't directly related to himself or the church. It was extremely difficult to watch Julia fall into Bryce's trap.

Domestic abuse is a huge part of this story, so readers who are triggered by this will most likely want to give it a pass. There's some physical and sexual abuse, but Bryce relies most heavily on emotional abuse and manipulation. He convinces Julia to doubt everything about herself, and it doesn't take long for her to be completely cowed by him. Ms. Olsen's descriptions of the abuse Julia suffers feels completely real. In fact, I had to put the book down a few times to give myself a break from all the emotions the story brought up.

About halfway through, I became pretty sure I knew the direction the story would take. Everything seemed to point to one specific ending, and I was a little disappointed that I figured things out so quickly. However, as I continued reading, it became apparent that I'd been completely incorrect about almost everything. The plot didn't go where I thought it would; things happened that I never saw coming.

I want to make it clear that this is not a mystery in the traditional sense in that we know who the bad guys are right from the start. Even so, I was gripped as I watched Julia figure out what was going on, and I loved every minute I spent with these characters.

I could go on and on about the excellence of this novel, but I'll spare you more of my rhapsodizing and just urge you to pick With You Always up at your earliest convenience. I'm sure you won't regret it.

Buy it at: Amazon/Barnes & Noble/iBooks/Kobo

Oh Julia. Julia is a woman who seems incapable of standing up or alone for herself but rather sublimates herself for men. Sorry but she is. This is not a good thing in any way. This neatly written thriller starts as she's floundering after stepping back in her career for a man who dumped her. Now she's met Bryce, who is rich and seems pretty cool. He takes her to church- and it's a lot of what they do together. You'll see the twisty things here before she does. This is not a new plot line but Olsen has done a good job with it. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. This makes for a good beach or travel read.

Another 3.5 ⭐️ suspenseful thriller. I found the book interesting, but it left unanswered questions — which I didn’t care for. Throughout the book, there are brief chapters that give a glimpse of Bryce’s past and hints of what we might expect from the ending. Those chapters were the most interesting and I wish more of the book was dedicated to that portion of the story. The plot is your typical boy meets girl, instantly sweeps her off her feet and they marry — without the happily-ever-after. The author does throw in some different context, which changed things up some.

Julia is an assistant at a marketing firm, trying to impress her boss and get a promotion. Then she meets Bryce and they begin a whirlwind romance. He’s everything she needs after a complicated relationship with her ex-fiancé — handsome, successful, supportive and charming.

After the proposal, she becomes overwhelmingly busy. She struggles to make time for everything without being stressed out and ends up quitting her dream job, that has now become too demanding. There isn’t as much time for friends and family, either. Which is fine because some are skeptical of Bryce and don’t understand their relationship. She’s even convinced they might be jealous.

Bryce has a wonderful “church family” that consumes most of their time and although she’s never been religious, the church is so welcoming that she begins to understand the importance of faith. Her life has finally taken a turn in the right direction!

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Group-Putnam for this ARC, in exchange for my honest review!
#WithYouAlways #NetGalley

Olsen kept the thrills coming in this face paced page turner.I don't think the characters were developed as much as I could have liked but the writing made the shortcomings acceptable.

Short Take: Like a fun-size candy bar - tasty for a minute, but unsatisfying.

(*Note - I received a free advance copy of this book for review.*)

Mega-churches are skeevy, aren’t they? I mean, you have the pastors with their shellacked hair and blinding veneers, hopping around doing their darnedest to convince their congregation that God wants them to have a private jet. It’s no secret that Joel Osteen and his ilk prey on people who are desperate for some kind of help, and scam them out of what little they have. But as disgusting as I find their behavior, I have to acknowledge that behind the spotlights and designer choir robes, there might be worse crimes than stealing from the poor.

Enter Julia. She’s at a bit of a crossroads in life, just coming out of a bad break-up, and trying to get a promotion at work when Bryce Covington blows into her life. He’s rich, gorgeous, and treats Julia like a queen, lavishing her with attention and gifts. He’s also mysterious - he will not speak of his family, insisting that the only family that matters to him are the Reverend and his wife Nancy, leaders of the Church of the Life, who took him in as a teenager. Although Julia has never been into religion, she begins attending church with Bryce, gradually abandoning her own life in order to be accepted into his.

Julia gives up her job, contact with her family, hanging out with her friends, and pretty much everything that mattered to her before Bryce, and do I even need to tell you what a Bad Idea that is? Because of course Bryce is not the Prince Charming he appeared to be, and the church is way more sinister than Julia could’ve imagined.

As much as I love a good takedown of a religious huckster, With You Always didn’t do that. It didn’t even try. The first three-quarters of the is nothing but Julia mooning over Bryce and ignoring everyone who tries to talk sense to her. She’s That Girl, the one who will change everything about herself and turn her back on everyone who’s been there for her throughout her life to keep a guy. It’s pathetic. When Julia finally starts to wise up and realize YOU IN DANGER GIRL, there’s exactly one scene, one character getting what they deserve in the space of a single paragraph, and Bam! Over.

Ms. Olsen gives readers a lot of tantalizing mysteries to gnaw on, then ignores them. For example, who in the church’s inner circle was responsible for [spoiler], and did they get any kind of punishment for that? Were there any consequences for anything on the church’s end? We don’t find out what happened in Julia’s life after all this, at all. The epilogue is literally like 20 minutes after the climax, and it amounts to “and she lived happily ever after”, which, uh, NO. There’s absolutely no way that [spoiler] wouldn’t be out for revenge, or that she would just walk away and go back to her old life after burning so many bridges, not to mention the whole police thing.

And honestly, with the way Julia treated everyone around her, it’s really hard to care what happened next. I’m inclined to think the author agreed.


The Nerd’s Rating: Two Happy Neurons (and a full-size candy bar. Because whoever invented “fun size” clearly doesn’t understand candy bars.)

With Olsen’s sophomore novel, she’s becoming an author to watch. The stories are not perfect, but they kept this reader engaged.

Julia feels adrift, so when Bryce blows into her life, he seems like the perfect anchor. Bryce brings out the best in Julia, sweeping her off her feet with attention and affection while grounding her with his certainty and faith. Together they embark on a path guided by the principles of his family and their church, each step a paving stone leading to happily ever after. But is it?

This book doesn’t go from zero to sixty. It’s more of a slow burn that kept me turning the pages trying to figure out exactly what kind of story I was going to get. The characters are well written and the fact that there was something off about Bryce was clear from the beginning. You can just sense it and by the end I hated him. He made me sick to my stomach. Why? Well, you’ll have to read this one to find out. I don’t do spoilers 😉
While I read this book quickly, once I closed it, I wished that the beginning had been condensed and the ending expanded. I thought the epilogue a bit disappointing and wanted a look a little farther down the road.

Sometimes I pay attention to the title of a book. How does it relate to the story? At one point I tried figuring out what the title With You Always meant. When it started to make sense (at least to me), it really added a depth to the telling of the story.

Looking for the next book that will raise your blood pressure and frustration, then this book is for you.

Wow!!! What a book couldn’t put it down. I really enjoyed and thought it was so different from other books I have read.

Loved this book, even when I was not reading it I kept thinking about it and couldn’t wait to pick it up again, hence I finished it in a day. Would definitely recommend to others and can’t wait to read other titles from this author.

One of the best I've read this year, and that's hard to say because I've read some amazing books. I thought it was well written and developed and you could see her being sucked in and completely losing herself; but didn't know how she'd ever escape! I absolutely will be reading more of this Author and giving a very good review and high recommendation for this book in Chapter Chatter Pub!

A big thank you to Penguin Group and Netgalley for letting me read an arc of this title. I loved the book. Julia recently suffered from a painful breakup and now spent her time trying to get a promotion at work. Then she met Bryce who seemed perfect in every way. He was rich, successful and knew how to show Julia a good time.

Things progressed and Julia started attending Bryce’s church with him. A few times things that happened in the church seemed a bit off to her, but she put those thoughts aside because Bryce was so perfect for her. Until he wasn’t.

Can you say “Cult”? She’s sequestered from the outside world, and it seems like everyone who sees her reports her activities back to Bryce. Will she realize what’s going on? Can she get out before it’s too late? That’s for you to stay up nights finding out. Because you won’t be able to put this book down. The tension is so taut you could cut it with a knife. Olsen is now on my to-read list for all future novels.

Reading this book was like sitting through a movie and yelling " don't do it, don't go there" at the screen. the reader can see where it's all going but she can't and there's nothing you can do. Very good book, l was hooked from the beginning.

Even though I found this predictable, I couldn't stop reading. Rena Olsen is a new author to me but I will be seeking out her other books to read!

I was glued to the story right up until the brilliant ending (and could still use about 50 more pages)

Julia is about to discover that love on the rebound is never a good thing, sometimes it can be deadly. When Julia meets Bryce after a brutal break-up, she thinks he’s the man of her dreams. He’s kind, solicitous, charming and a man of deep faith. What could be better? But soon Bryce’s concern becomes overbearing, he needs to know where she is every moment of every day and who she’s with. He slowly cuts her off from her job, her friends and her family. Julia feels trapped and can’t think of anyway to escape Bryce alive…or can she? Having seen a family member go through a nightmare like this, I can attest how easy it is to fall into a snare like the one Bryce sets and how utterly impossible it seems to escape. Read and be warned