Dirty Little Secret by Jennifer Echols

Publisher: MTV Books
Publication Date: July 16th 2013
Pages: 288
Source: EGalley for review
Genre: Contemporary, Romance
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Bailey wasn’t always a wild child and the black sheep of her family. She used to play fiddle and tour the music circuit with her sister, Julie, who sang and played guitar. That ended when country music execs swooped in and signed Julie to a solo deal. Never mind that Julie and Bailey were a duet, or that Bailey was their songwriter. The music scouts wanted only Julie, and their parents were content to sit by and let her fulfill her dreams while Bailey’s were hushed away.

Bailey has tried to numb the pain and disappointment over what could have been. And as Julie’s debut album is set to hit the charts, her parents get fed up with Bailey’s antics and ship her off to granddad’s house in Nashville. Playing fiddle in washed-up tribute groups at the mall, Bailey meets Sam, a handsome and oh-so-persuasive guitarist with his own band. He knows Bailey’s fiddle playing is just the thing his band needs to break into the industry. But this life has broken Bailey’s heart once before. She isn’t sure she’s ready to let Sam take her there again…

This book was really hard to get into in general. I had been expecting good things when I first got this book because I really liked the author's last book, Such a Rush. Just before I read it I heard several people say some not-so-great things about it so I ended up going in quite cautious.

This book takes place in Tennessee with very southern people in a very southern culture around tons of country music. This was one of the better parts of the book. I like how the book was just immersed in southern culture and the southern mind set. I also love how the book was extremely musical. I love books in which the character has a passion, and this one was quite interesting.

Another really great part of this book was how there is a lot of growth not only for the main character, Bailey but for her family as well. Bailey has a really terrible family. Her sister has recently just made it big and has a record contract, and as soon as that happened her parents left her behind with her grandpa and told her not to pursue music anymore. Seriously, terrible parenting. I'm not going to say that they become good parents in the end, but they no longer are disowning her in the end, which is a start I suppose.

The biggest reason why I seriously could not like this book was  because the romance was just terrible. This book had some very subtle insta-love in it. I felt like they were doing everything really really fast, they barely knew each other before the seemed to get all serious about each other. The love interest, Sam was a huge jerk and seemed to be just trying to get something or another from Bailey due to her sister's connections.

In the end I was pretty disappointed about this book. I liked some of the major points in the book, but in the end the romance was just pretty bad, which ruined the story line for the most part.