Love is Worth Fighting for (The Meraki Series Book 3) by Effie Kammenou – Review by Alexandria Richard

Love is Worth Fighting for by Effie Kammenou
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A story about fighting to be with the one you want and the strains that can pull you apart.

A dual-generational story. More New Adult than YA. Contemporary romance with real life influence from the COVID pandemic.

This novel lives up to the contemporary romance name with a large chunk of it having the characters face the ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic and how their lives were impacted by the shut down in the United States. If you’re looking for a novel which will help you to escape this may not be the one for you, but while it does deal with very tense subjects the novel was very well done and kept me engaged, reading on to find out what happened with Krystina and Loukas. This novel is also very much a will they/won’t they romance.

I can’t say that I loved Krystina’s character, but I can empathize with her and the desire to protect herself from the hurt Loukas had previously caused. I did enjoy that Loukas was willing to go all in with Krystina and kept fighting to show her he cared, but I found some of the ways he mentally manipulated her to be juvenile and deceitful. Despite that feeling though I do think it was fairly realistic of the things people will do in life in order to get attention. I did like how Krystina also wanted to help those around her to be and stay happy, and was an amazing friend to non-familial side characters Egypt and Chynna. I do wish we got to see more of Loukas training and wanting to fight in the beginning of the book.

I rather enjoyed the flash back scenes to Kalliope and Panos’s courting, relationship, and their forced separation. This allowed for a more detailed depiction of the background of the grandparent’s and how that influenced Krystina and her siblings.

I had not read the other two books in the series but I found that I could follow along pretty well. The author was good about describing the impact of the things mentioned which seemed like it had occurred in the previous books. It’s also a way to get the reader on the hook and get them to want to go back and read the others.

CW: Prisoner of war description, war disfigurement, COVID forced quarantining and sickness, organized fighting and mixed martial arts (MMA).

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