This supposed love story from Erin McCarthy was a slog. I normally love her writing, or at least, I did back when I was reading it on the reg, but this book didn’t land for me. It’s a second chance romance that revolves around Cat and Heath, who hail from a remote island in Maine, and have issues surrounding that start in life.
Cat likes to pretend she doesn’t come from a hard scrabble existence, and has built a new college persona that has netted her a popular frat boy fiancé and a bunch of poorly fleshed out sorority girl friends. Heath is a loner who split right after he popped Cat’s cherry, didn’t tell her why, and joined the Marines to the tune of four years with no word between them. The whole conflict covered in the book kicks off when Heath, her foster brother/first love shows back up in her life the same night her college boyfriend proposes to her. So, yeeaahhh – not eye rolly or cliché at all. I actually yelled out loud, “Oh, come ON!”
We find out later Heath had thin reasons to desert Cat, and she struggles with who she should choose, her new shiny boyfriend or her first love. It’s all very predictable, and not a little bit boring. The characters are dull or super annoying. Frankly, there’s not much to root for one way or another. I mostly rooted for less pages to exist.
Cat’s life pretty much implodes, and instead of dealing with that, she jumps right back into a relationship with Heath, with whom she has a tumultuous, obsessive relationship. Their problems are never dealt with or resolved, despite several break up make up scenes. They ostensibly end up living HEA, but you also get the feeling that these two damaged souls are going to destroy each other. That is, if the “heroine” hadn’t given up every single one of her new dreams to do exactly what she always planned to do in high school. Sounds healthy and totally not stifling or disappointing.
If you have any care for your time or your anger levels, give this one a miss, because it sucks donkey balls.
On the other hand, if you want an actual college romance with a heaping helping of angst, go for Charlotte Stein’s Never Sweeter instead. It has characters you actually care about, and hotter love scenes than Erin McCarthy sports in her whole catalog.
