Sometimes, blackmail is the only weapon a girl has…
Haley Patterson has had a crush on golden boy Bryce Colton for ages. But when she hears a rumor that he hooked up with her she gives him a choice: be her boyfriend for a month to show other guys that she’s dateable-despite her overprotective and very intimidating brothers-or deal with the angry, cage-fighting boyfriend of the girl he actually did hook up with.
Bryce didn’t know the other Haley even had a boyfriend. He was just trying to get his ex off his back. And now, not only is he being blackmailed, he’s being blackmailed by an honor student. His new “girlfriend” has two three-legged dogs, her father mows grass at the country club, and she’s…well, difficult. And different.
Can something so fake turn into something real?
I’ve had this book on my kindle (and on my TBR) for a long time now, and I thought that it was finally time to get to it. I’ve read a lot of contemporaries lately, and also a lot of fake-relationship romances, so I’m sorry to say that this book disappointed me… a lot. It not only has a great goodreads average rating, but it has good ratings from fellow bloggers, so I thought this would be a lot better to be honest =/.
Let’s start with the writing. I thought the writing itself was pretty average, but what it failed on was the dual POV. As you know, I’m a huge fan of dual POV, I think it brings a lot to the table in romance novels. But the problem here was that the dual POV was not great, and the two main characters didn’t have distinct enough voices. Sometimes I had to revert to the beginning of a chapter to know who was talking, and I even spotted at least one time that the author herself was confused about who that POV belonged to… never a good sign.
Another thing that bothered me a lot was the errors in formatting, as well as some typos. My brain is OK to ignore both things when I’m reading an ARC, because it knows that it’s not a finished version. But here this wasn’t the case. This book was the kindle version sold on amazon, which means that some kind of things shouldn’t be found.
I had some problems with the two main characters too. Haley felt too young and immature. While her plan initially is supposed to be opening the way for other boys to know she’s datable, she’s infatuated by Bryce right from the start and hopes to make their relationship real very early on, even without really knowing him. Her reactions annoyed me a lot of the times too. Bryce was no better, unfortunately. He was super clueless, but that could have been kind of cute, right? But he ran hot and cold, and most of the times he was inconsiderate, and I wanted to slap the hell out of him. To be honest, I liked their 2 BFFs a lot better, and even their romance was better, and I kind of wish that the book had been about them instead of Haley and Bryce.
The plot was interesting though, and had a lot of potential. I especially liked Haley’s twin brothers and how protective they were of their sister. The romance itself also had potential, but I thought the execution was a bit shady and several potentially romantic moments were wasted.
At least the parents were very present in this book, even if they each had only one normal and good parent, because Bryce’s dad and Haley’s mom were terrible!
Honestly this book was OK, entertaining, but not good. I couldn’t relate at all with the characters and they were super annoying to me. I’m sure though, that a lot of people won’t have this problem, so I can’t tell you not to read it… it just wasn’t for me.
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