By L.B. Martin
Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for a honest review.
I decided to choose an ARC with the following tagline:
A forbidden stepbrother. A morally gray predator. A girl who should have known better than to bleed in shark-infested waters.
I’m generally easy to please and I’m not looking for the next great literary novel when the blurb starts out like that. I know what I’m getting myself into, and if the writer can string words together and doesn’t try to get all fancy with the thesaurus, it’s gonna be a good time.
I’ll start with the content warning: it’s a dark romance. The FMC is not going to be excited about the possessive MMC stalking here around campus. But she’ll be drawn to his sexy abs and penetrating eyes which will make him irresistible when she knows she should say no. I don’t even have to read the book to know that’s about the gist of it. There is even a recommended playlist with songs from Hozier, Sleep Token and Taylor Swift. I am removing .25 of a mark just for that. If you are going to write an actual DARK romance, make your playlist actually DARK.
And so, I wasn’t disappointed. This was like a speed run of a dark romance. The entire enemy to lovers trope plays out in less than a week. Our FMC, Fallon, moves into the freshman dorm on Saturday morning, confronts the MMC, Remington, on her way. creates a scene not knowing he is the BMOC, his last name iS Frampton, and this is Frampton U. That evening her and new BFFs/ Roomies hit the swim team frat boy party, hosted by none other than.. you guessed, Mr. Remy Frampton himself. She doesn’t even spend the first night on Campus in her own bed!
The following will be spoilers, technically, except they are just like every DR troped up book. We don’t have time to differentiate them with originality, this is DR speedrun!
Various shenanigans occur. Sunday, he stalks her in the library. Monday is Swim team initiation which is copied directly from Rina Kent’s legacy of Gods series, right down to the masks, so we don’t have to have too much explanation. Tuesday, we show up at his swim meet and learn that FishNettes are like Puck Bunnies but for swim teams. Who knew? they are bunch of slutty mean girl sluts. We don’t even have to spend time on a confrontation, we all know they will hate Fallon for snagging their team captain. Wednesday and Thursday these kids actually go to class, but on Friday, Fallon goes to meet her mom who needs to tell her something important, and Remy, goes to meet his dad who has to tell him something important. SURPRISE! they show up at the same restaurant, where their respective parents announce they have been secretly dating and they went and got married, so our FMC and MMC are now step siblings!
This can’t be a spoiler because the whole book is premised on the forbidden step brother / step sister love plot.
Fallon can’t possibly date her stepbrother now, so she leaves the restaurant to go to a beach party with her roomies/ BFF. She drinks a White Claw. Then Remy stalks her and finds her there. He can’t stop thinking about her. He convinces her to go home with him where they share their past trauma and scars and stuff, and make love and when they wake up in the morning, Remy says that he is love (a whole week has gone by!) and would like to take her on a date. But, on her way back to her dorm, they have a fight!
Remy’s bros are like “yo, dude, chill” and Remy is like, “whoa, I’m gotta chill” and he goes to arrange this special date to show how much Fallon means to him, over the last week.
Fallon was going to ignore his text, but she has a heart to heart with her new roomie/ BFF (she’s never had such real friends before college!) and she is going to give him a chance.
But on her way, she is waylaid by the evil villains of the book, who I won’t spoil, but did you know her dad was in jail for being a drunken abusive father? Just saying. Luckily Remy had installed a tracker on her iphone and will he be able to get to Fallon in time to save her? Well, I’m not going to give away the entire book.
I don’t know what I expected and you know what? I’m not even mad. I feel like I’ve read this book 100x, done much better but it could have also been so much worse. I can’t complain about the writing style and I think it took about 2 or 3 hours to read. I might even read the next book in the series. It’s going to be a why choose, so why not? And it doesn’t have that AI feel about it, I’m convinced this was a real person who wrote this.
I’m giving this a 2.75/ 5 rounded up to 3 in NetGalley – see, it passed the halfway mark. And you know what, for those readers who are a bit scared of dark romances this is about as sanitized as you will find, so maybe if someone is looking to push their boundaries they could do a lot worse than this.
