How far would you go for revenge?A hit-and-run accident leaves Jersey Six orphaned and homeless on the streets of Newark, shattering her dreams of school dances, pink nail polish, and a diploma.Eight years later, a burn victim with amnesia wanders into Jersey’s barely-existent life. She resists his efforts to form a friendship until he reveals knowledge of the person responsible for derailing her … responsible for derailing her future. Through their unusual friendship, she discovers a way to avenge the deaths of her foster parents.
All she has to do is destroy the world’s biggest rock star.
In the ultimate game of sex, lies, and manipulation, can Jersey discover the truth? Or will she be blinded by attraction, deceived by love, and destroyed by her past?
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I had forgotten just how well Jewel E. Ann writes suspenseful fiction. Jersey Six is mind-blowing, nail biting, deliciously complex, and intriguingly dark. I. Loved. It. That’s really saying something because I don’t typically go for dark stories.
I’ll be honest. These people are more than a little bit messed up. Jewel E. Ann excels in character development, and you’d be hard pressed to find more complicated characters than Jersey, Ian, and Chris. I had a unique fondness for each one, even though some of their actions are disturbing. This story had me evaluating my perception of villains and left me conflicted at times.
As a reader who frequently smells a plot twist from a mile away, I was thrilled by the knockout punches this story delivers. The plot is unequivocally unique, unpredictable, and addictive. I finished Jersey Six and almost immediately wanted to go back and re-read it with the benefit of hindsight.
Every chapter will have you on the edge of your seat, so I suggest you have a glass (or three) of wine on hand to sooth your nerves. Trust me; you’ll need it. Hang on tight and enjoy this emotional thrill ride.
Another wonderful story by a favorite author….very different….very emotional….Don t want to say more….still thinking about it…
OMG this book tore my heart into a million little pieces and then put it back together again! I absolutely loved every page of Jersey Six at the same time I was hating some of them. Jersey has such a traumatic past. Her one chance at a normal life was ripped away from her in a heartbeat. Chris is a burn victim with no memory of his past. Ian has what appears to be the perfect life but things aren’t always what they seem.
I love how Jewel E Ann can suck you in and keep you reading right to the last page. Jersey Six is emotional on so many levels. If you want amazing characters and a deep storyline grab Jersey Six and start reading!
Well, I started this later in the evening and ended up finishing it at 2:30am. Half the time I was asking myself what the french toast is going on? I just couldn’t stop reading. I needed to find out everything. My husband is all snoring and I’m pushing him to roll over because plot twist! It was all eyeballs on deck for the last 20% of the book. It was hard to read at times because it was super heavy, but omg the story blew me away. I loved, loved, loved the epilogue. I need this book for my bookshelf.
Reviews by the Wicked Reads Review Team
Ruthie –
WOW!
This is one of those books which I just want to tell you to read. I refuse to give you any plot details whatsoever, because you need to read it yourself, and not be influenced in any way by what I may inadvertently reveal.
Yes, the writing is great, the story is wild, and the outcome is…
Seriously, just go and get a copy and make your own mind up.
Thank you, Jewel E. Ann, for a stonkingly good read.
Erica –
Spoiler-Free Review, which means it’s going to be short and vague, since there isn’t much I can say that won’t be a spoiler.
From word one, I was hooked. I absolutely couldn’t put down the book down. I generally do not enjoy amnesia storylines, but combined with the mystery of the past, and what happened in the fire, I was riveted.
Chris. Jersey Six. Ian. Two are homeless. One is fortunate. There are three narrators, all connected from a shared past, none of them being honest and truthful.
Unreliable narrators who manage to keep parts hidden, even when the passages are in their voice. This surprisingly doesn’t come off as frustrating, as it often does, using this trick to exploit the reader. With these three narrators, it’s not surprising that they would be lying to themselves, evading their own pasts, or just not be in-the-know, so therefore the reader is in the dark as well. It was fitting, leaving nothing but an air of mystery.
Two were homed with a set of foster parents, one accidentally killed the foster parents in a hit-and-run while they were taking their morning walk, destroying any future Jersey Six may have had. All three knew the foster parents, as well as were connected by the boxing gym, Marley’s.
One knows the truth, one refuses to recognize the truth, and one is left completely in the dark.
Two plot to kill the third in a vengeance quest in honor of the foster parents, leading to twists and turns, their narration keeping everything hidden, leaving the reader on the edge of their seat.
I don’t normally add a trigger warning, having read and enjoyed (I don’t know if that’s the correct word-usage) some of the darkest of novels. But there was a portion I struggled to read, feeling sick to my stomach, almost PTSD symptoms as I read the perils of the foster care system, when bad people abuse the system to feed their sick desires with more victims.
I’d love to explain deeper, as it was a twisted, devious, dark ride, but I refuse to ruin the journey for other readers. Sorry about being vague, but it’s in your best interests that I am.
The one major twist, I kept saying to myself “I know what’s going on!” but then self-doubt would creep in and I’d say, “Nah! What the heck is going on here?”
Because I’m a smug chick. I was right!
Reviewers on the Wicked Reads Review Team were provided a free copy of Jersey Six by Jewel E. Ann to read and review.
Stop what you are doing and read this book. This author never disappoints. You will hate every character at some point because they are human. You will find the story raw And hard to put down.
This new to me author wowed the hell out of me and combined two of my favorite kinds of romance genres into one very different, spectacular and unforgettable book. Rockstars (had me right there) but then dark, raw, emotional and so real..
Jersey Six was all about the broken- minds, bodies, hearts, souls. Revenge warring with hope and love, wondering- do I deserve either and would I know it if I saw it?
This one had so much crazy suspense tucked into almost every chapter..who were the evil party or parties here? How far would they really go to get what they want in the end? How far have they gone in the past?
I couldn’t have put this book down if tried, it was that amazing. Ian was my kind of H, the epitome of a sexy, gorgeous lead singer but you just knew he was hiding something. The rough and tumble Jersey could drop a man with a single jab but as badass as she obviously was, there was an innocence and vulnerability to her that made you want to give her the biggest hug and tell her everything would be alright because her life had been anything but normal.
The end- OMG, I thought I had it all figured out but wrong, wrong, wrong! This is really a book worth reading, even if rockstar romances aren’t your thing. It’s steamy, sexy, suspenseful and witty but definitely digging into some of the sadder and badder sides of life too. Not a fairytale, not for the faint of heart, but does have a hard fought HEA with a sweet, tear inducing epilogue, the kind I love the most! I know I will be thinking about Jersey Six for a long time to come and Jewel E. Ann now has a new fangirl..me!
Jewel E Ann has a wonderful talent of writing the most beautifully flawed, broken characters, that are so strong, and so determined to rise above their life circumstances, that I’m always left in absolute awww at the end of her stories. This book was all of that, and so much more! I think this may be the best work she’s done yet! I went in blind, and I’m so glad I did! I had no idea where this story was going to take me. I highly recommend just reading it without any detailed reviews or spoilers. You won’t be disappointed!
“I’ve spent my whole life waiting to love you.”
The good news….JEA has another completely unique and twisted tale filled with mystery and amazing characters. Unlike her other books this one did not destroy me. I’m not sure if that was because my brain was so focused on figuring out the secrets or what, but normally I am guaranteed a good ugly cry and although the story had true heartbreaking elements, they just didn’t push me over the cliff.
The main characters are:
Jersey – a girl who grew up in the system moving from one bad foster home to another.
Chris – a guy who was injured and lost his memory.
Ian – the biggest Rockstar who crosses paths with Jersey and offers her something she can’t pass up.
As usual, it is nearly impossible to review this without spoiling it, so you’re just going to have to take a leap of faith and jump in with both feet. One thing I can say is that the final twist was so unexpected that I had to go back and reread a few pages since I didn’t quite believe what happened, but it was so perfect and completely unpredictable! Amazing job!
Hero (Ian) 5 | Heroine (Jersey) 5 | Plot 5 | Writing Style 5 | Steam 4 | Romance 3 | Angst-Suspense 4 | Darkness 1 | Humor 1 | Secondary Characters 4 | Drama-Conflict 4 | Mystery 4 | Twists 5 | Action 1 | Pacing Steady | Dual POV | MF | Edge of my Seat | Complex | Standalone | Twists and Turns | Overall 5 Stars
#MSBB
Ms. Ann has a way of making a steamy love story so unique and twisty and Jersey’s story is no different. There are several “did I really just read that” moments that make you question what you think you know about the characters and their motivations. I really enjoyed Jersey Six and can’t wait to see what Ms. Ann comes up with next!
Hands down the best book of 2019!!!
Jersey Six has had a very hard life. Unwanted as a baby and then bounced around from foster home to foster home, some worse than others. She found one home where she felt safe and had the potential to be loved, but her foster parents were dead as the result of a hit and run and at 15, she was all alone again. Not wanting to chance getting into another messed up situation, Jersey chose to run and live her life on the streets and on her own terms. 8 years later, a guy who is covered from head to toe with burns and only remembers his first name is Chris, wanders into the run-down gym that Jersey calls home. He is determined to become Jersey’s new friend and tells her he has answers about her past and can help her seek the revenge she thirsts for.
Jersey has a chance meeting with a famous rock star, Ian Cooper, on the streets of New York. He promises to show her the world and agrees to her bringing along her new friend, Chris. With the gym closing down, Jersey and Chris grab at the chance to see more of the world and have a safe place to stay for awhile. Jersey is supposed to keep her plan for revenge at the forefront of her mind but as she spends more time with Ian, she is distracted from what that plan is. Will Jersey get the revenge she seeks and who has her best interests at heart – Chris or Ian?
I am a huge fan of Jewel E. Ann and have been for several years now but this book totally blew me away!!! I thought that I had everything figured out with this one but I was not even close!! I loved this book with all its twists and turns. There are dark moments and there are some sweet, swoony moments and everything in between. I had a major hangover after I finished this story and I just wish I could go back into Jersey’s world for a little longer. I highly recommend this amazing read!!!
I glanced at the title of this book and maybe the first line of the sales copy and thought it was about a group of six homeless teens/young adults in New Jersey.
No, Jersey Six is one girl who’s been homeless from the time she was fifteen, and it’s great at building the world of one fierce, damaged, untrusting homeless girl.
There’s a bit of a mystery about her good friend who’s been through a trauma and lost parts of his memory and a guy who comes into her life by chance and is determined to help her.
Lots of angst, which I love. Deep, dark secrets, which I also love, and a very protective hero — big, big love of mine.
And it managed to surprise me, which very few books do.
I think this is the most twisted book I’ve read. Full of sinister thoughts, dark purposes, thoughts of revenge twisted with reluctant love. Jersey Six is a product of a failed foster system, a child placed in homes where she was constantly abused and denigrated. Her life for the first eighteen years is sordid, based on survival, fighting for food and shelter. When Chris arrives at the gym where she “lives”, she has no pity for him even though he has severe and disfiguring burns and suffers from memory loss. Eventually, he wears her down and stays and they forge an unlikely friendship based on mutual survival. It was a miserable existence, lacking all kinds of menial comforts, dignity and privacy.
When Jersey meets Ian Cooper, and he offers them both jobs, you don’t understand why. His explanation is that she reminds him of someone in his past. Then Chris has a sudden memory flash and realizes that Ian is the one who killed the Russels, the foster parents in whose house Jersey lived for the only six months of her life where she was accepted, loved and kept safe. They decide on revenge and start a dark and twisted plan.
The problem with this plan is that Ian is a genuinely nice person, generous and attentive. He’s surrounded by his bandmates and his assistant Max, and they form a family. He’s a rock star who has enjoyed fame for ten years, but nobody knows where he came from and what his life was before that. He’s keeping secrets and he’s not sharing. Anything else, he’s sharing with Jersey and soon they have a co-dependent relation where they crave each other’s body. Their relation is weird and felt like co-dependency at first.
Jersey is torn in different directions, developing feelings for Ian, recognizing the goodness in him, and dealing with the darkness and maliciousness that is developing in Chris. This story was fascinating in its darkness, the turmoil in Jersey’s feelings, her innocence mixed with her hostility, her insecurity and defensiveness when faced with her lack of knowledge and schooling, the care and consideration that Max and Ian offer her. I felt that Jersey was being pulled in different directions and didn’t know what was what. She was sure of her prowess in a boxing ring but she didn’t have the intuition to discern who was true and who was shifty.
This was a fascinating book and the last part is a shocker.
Jersey has been handed the rough side of life having grown up in the system bouncing from foster home to foster home, finally ending up with a nice family all the kindness she was starting to know is torn from her when they tragically die. Having enough of the foster system Jersey runs away at the age of 15 eventually ending up at Marley’s gym with skills not to messed with.
Ian Cooper didn’t have a fairy tale childhood either having been just born and left at the fire station on Christmas day. However, these days he is a rock star traveling the world and offers Jersey a job that sounds way to good to be true. Jersey agrees as long as her friend Chris who she met at Marley’s gets to come along too.
At times Jersey can be a less then desirable character, her childhood really messed her up and her relationship with Chris is so toxic I really question how Ian ever agreed to letting him come along. Ian however, was an amazing character and I absolutely loved him. He really makes the book and had me loving him from the get go.
This book has so much with twist and turns everywhere and there is so little I can say without potentially spoiling something but it is absolutely worth your time to read because as always Jewel E. Ann is able to be original and blow me away with this newest story.
I’m still riding the emotional high so I’m saying sorry in advance if my thoughts will sound a bit jumbled and messy because I just felt like my head and my emotions ran through a blender. Was it possible to feel numb,shocked and happy within the same breath? Cause that was what I felt with this amazingly phenomenal book, Jersey Six.
This book… what can I say? It’s pure perfection. I wasn’t a fan of romantic suspense, but Jersey Six sold me. This book has become one of my top reads of 2019! Hands down!
I loved, loved, LOVED Jersey and Ian. Their love story is ridden with a lot of secrets, angst and shared painful pasts that almost broke them apart, but in the end, true love will always prevail.
I never saw that plot twist coming and I was well truly shocked. I cried for the pain they both suffered, but most of all I cried for their lost time. This book teared my heart with its beautifully rendered story of two broken people who was given a chance for a new life and love. And I admit, this book has touched me in a deeper level that I can never explained but did. It is dark, raw and gritty but I loved it. I can already feel a book hangover. The characters and their story until now haunts me, so I guess I will re-read it. Again and again.
5+ stars review!
‘Be brave and run fast’
The above piece of advice and her need for revenge are the two driving forces of Jersey Six’s life ever since she made the decision to live on the streets rather than be placed in another deplorable foster care situation like the ones that have already scarred her in irreparable ways. And while things haven’t been easy for her, she’s learned to fend for herself, taking desperate measures to accomplish small feats when necessary and doing everything she can not to give up on herself or become just another homeless orphan who got lost in the system, never seeming to have her best interests at heart, and lost in an environment that seemed to continually destroy her hopes and dreams, easily bringing her to her knees without any assistance to help her get back up.
Jersey is definitely a flawed character – one who is a product of her dark, dangerous, and devastating environment. But Jersey refuses to be a victim of her circumstances, which means that she uses her experiences, her flaws, her snark, and her scars as armor, protecting her from those who would use her or hurt her without a second thought. That’s not to say that she hasn’t taken some missteps and found herself in situations where she’s lost bits and pieces of herself and her soul, but Jersey won’t go down without a fight nor will she give up her quest for revenge because it’s what defines her and keeps her moving when it seems easier to just give up.
This story is as unpredictable and complex as its heroine, which makes it necessary for readers to always keep in mind what Jersey is willing to do to achieve her end goal, even if it means putting herself on a path that there may not be any coming back from, but while her decisions and actions are highly questionable, in some ways, because of how Jersey grew up and what she was involuntarily put through, she doesn’t see things in black and white; in fact, she lives squarely in the grey area, which some people would never understand.
I do have to admit…it took me a bit to get into the story, and then, once I did, I needed to sift through and understand a large amount of information – details that were not delivered in a straightforward way, which meant that all of the unexpected twists and turns that occurred had to be sorted and manipulated in ways that made sense, and that took some time and quite a bit of concentration. But in the end, it was clear that the non-sequential plot line fed into the complete dysfunction of Jersey and of her plan, which, after the fact, became so much clearer.
Jersey Six was my first read by Jewel E. Ann, and it most definitely won’t be my last because she’s a unique storyteller who takes risks that I can appreciate when it comes to non-linear plot lines and drastically flawed characters, and anytime I can read books that go against the grain, even if only slightly, those are exactly the kind of books I’d choose.
4 Poison Apples Review
Jersey Six was a heart stopping, soul obliterating, nail biting romantic suspense, written in the beautifully lyrical prose that’s become classic Jewel E. Ann.
The Rumplestiltskin of the book community, everything Jewel writes is pure gold; wildly imaginative, and effortlessly composed. I don’t think I will ever get bored of the worlds at Ann’s fingertips, the flawlessly woven storytelling and utterly unique and unpredictable plots make her an author i will return to eagerly. I have a Jewel E. Ann addiction and I don’t care who knows it!
Wait… what?!?! This was written by Jewel E. Ann? I mean, I never ever would have put this book in with her other novels… ok, I haven’t read her Jack & Jill series, but still, I never would have put Jersey Six and say Look the Part as written by the exact same author. Let me say that I have loved Miss Ann’s other books do very much. However, there was something about the writing in Jersey Six. The storyline was so complex and twisted.
The characters were fabulous and really interesting. I remember being so bummed for Jersey in the beginning… here she thought life has turned around, started to go on the upswing. I really don’t feel like I can talk a lot about the book, there are just so many twists and just the unexpected. I really enjoyed the story, the characters; the varying feelings… everything combined created one of my top reads of the year!!
I received an ARC of this book with the hope that I would leave an Unbiased Opinion. I was not required to leave a review, positive or otherwise, and my opinions are just that… my opinions.
Jersey had a terrible childhood growing up in abusive homes. She found someone who needed a place to stay and a friend. Jersey gives her new friend Chris a place to stay at Marley’s gym.
Problem with that was Marley’s was closing and then both of them would be homeless.
Jersey runs into Ian Cooper ( Rock Star) on the street and he offers her a hotdog and a job to her and her friend Chris.
Why would a Rock Star offer a homeless girl and her friend a job and a place to stay ???
Well you’re in for a reading treat! This story has many twists and turns and sex! It will be a eye opener to say the least!
Another well written Gem from Jewel E. Ann!
I wasn’t ready for how much of a fun, twisted ride this story was going to be! I’m sure it didn’t help that I had kind of mis-remembered the blurb, but OMG. What a story!
You can’t help but feel empathy for Chris and even Jersey almost immediately. Here are two completely hard-luck people who have managed to at least find one another and scrape out an existence. In drops Ian and he immediately changes everything. The more you learn about everyone the more questions you have. I had figured out a number of the twists and reveals, but definitely not all, and when they hit they pack. a. punch! I was so frustrated with each of these characters at some points, but that just made them all the more real.
Highly recommend this twisty, angsty, steamy mysterious read!