So I am, what Mr. Beth Ellen likes to call, full of hormones and baby. This ends up translating to, for the past month or so, an inability to finish any book remotely upsetting. Characters aren’t nice? Set it aside. People don’t fall in love? Set it aside. So in general, for the next many months of Beast Residency, it looks like I’ll be reviewing a lot of romances. After finishing up the Ivy Years series I started asking the Zon for recommendations like Sarina Bowen. Elle Kennedy is first on the list, and she’s in the midst of writing a similar New Adult series! I’m in.
The Deal takes place at the fictional college of Briar in Massachusetts, and once again it’s about a hockey star. Sound a little too familiar? I wasn’t ready to leave Bowen’s world at Harkness so I was totally okay the copy cat-isms. This time it’s son of a NHL star, Garrett, needing tutoring for a philosophy class, and Hannah, scholarship music major, which a scaring secret in her past. She agrees, after some pestering, to start tutoring him if he’ll help her catch the eye of the football player she’s crushing on.
The set up was not great, but what I ended up really enjoying was that she figured out early on that she liked Garrett and wanted to be with him. Therefore she let any thoughts of the previous crush go. I was so delighted to have such a straightforward love story, where characters join up early, and work through things together. And then. Not so fast. Because with less than a quarter of the book left we have to yet again keep our characters apart! With a bunch of histrionics that felt completely unnecessary. Overall though, until then I totally enjoyed it.
I then downloaded the sample of the sequel from kindle, and there’s now a reason I’m not writing a review for both right now. The voices of all the characters are exactly the same as the last book. Everyone calls everyone else Babe or Baby (I know zero college kids who speak like this). It was once again a star hockey player and a wallflower. I needed something different this time. What I really appreciated in the other series was how distinct each character was.
So for this one off: pretty good. I was entertained for an evening, but I’m not looking to go deeper into the series unless I’ve really run out of other things to read.
