Lost and Found - Nicole Williams - 4 stars

I chose this book to read for a specific challenge in the Read Your E-reader read-a-thon, which was Trick or Treat challenge, read an e-book would not normally read and hope that it is good. Well this is not normally something I would read so I really did not know what to expect. This is also a new author for me. I was surprised that I enjoyed the book.
Synopsis
There’s complicated. And there’s Rowen Sterling.

After numbing pain for the past five years with boys, alcohol, and all-around apathy, she finds herself on a Greyhound bus to nowhere Montana the summer after she graduates high school. Her mom agreed to front the bill to Rowen’s dream art school only if Rowen proves she can work hard and stay out of trouble at Willow Springs Ranch. Cooking breakfast at the crack of dawn for a couple dozen ranch hands and mucking out horse stalls are the last things in the world Rowen wants to spend her summer doing.

Until Jesse Walker saunters into her life wearing a pair of painted-on jeans, a cowboy hat, and a grin that makes something in her chest she’d thought was frozen go boom-boom. Jesse’s like no one else, and certainly nothing like her. He’s the bright and shiny to her dark and jaded.

Rowen knows there’s no happily-ever-after for the golden boy and the rebel girl—happily-right-now is a stretch—so she tries to forget and ignore the boy who makes her feel things she’s not sure she’s ready to feel. But the more she pushes him away, the closer he seems to get. The more she convinces herself she doesn’t care, the harder she falls.

When her dark secrets refuse to stay locked behind the walls she’s kept up for years, Rowen realizes it’s not just everyone else she needs to be honest with. It’s herself.

The plot of the story was that got me to read this book since it really was something I would not normally read and fit the challenge well. I expected that it would be full of instalove, over the top sex and most certainly a love triangle of some kind, so I was not looking forward to reading it. I was pleasantly surprised that it was none of that. It was a very realistic and believable story. I found that the pacing was great and flowed really well. There were even parts that pulled on my heart strings. I found a part of the "near end" of the story a little predictable but it really did not take away from the story all that much.

I just really enjoyed the characters, they were all developed well throughout the story. I found that Rowen was a very relatable character which made her very realistic. I think that she was probably my favorite character of all of them. Only one thing kind of bugged me about her and that was her always thinking the worse. I know that is part of her character, but it could be toned down just a tad bit. Jesse was also a great character, he was a great match for Rowen, also pretty relatable. There are even characters in this story that we as readers get to hate.

I recommend this book to everyone. If I can read this and enjoy it, I feel like everyone can, so give it a shot. It tells a great story and it is pretty thought provoking.