4.5 stars
CBR13 Bingo: Rec’d (by Emmalita, Narfna and FaintingViolet)
Official book description:
Their lesson plans didn’t include love. But that’s about to change…
When Martin Krause arrives at Rose Owens’s high school, she’s determined to remain chilly with her new colleague. Unfriendly? Maybe. Understandable? Yes, since a loathsome administrator gave Rose’s beloved world history classes to Martin, knowing it would hurt her.
But keeping her distance from a man as warm and kind as Martin will prove challenging, even for a stubborn, guarded ice queen. Especially when she begins to see him for what he truly is: a man who’s never been taught his own value. Martin could use a good teacher–and luckily, Rose is the best.
Rose has her own lessons–about trust, about vulnerability, about her past–to learn. And over the course of a single school year, the two of them will find out just how hot it can get when an ice queen melts.
Olivia Dade has been on my TBR list for literally years and I even got an ARC of this book back in 2019, before it was first published. The original cover for the book was not the appealing and beautiful one it has now. Hence I forgot about it and my Netgalley completion stats got that little bit worse. Since then, I’ve seen Dade’s books raved about on a number of romance review sites, as well as on our own Cannonball Read. I kept promising myself that I would pick up one of her books, any day now. The lovely MsWas even gifted me Spoiler Alert. So when I was going to choose a book for the “Rec’d” category on this year’s CBR Bingo, I was pretty sure it had to be one of Olivia Dade’s, and my guilty conscience about never having reviewed my NetGalley ARC reared its head – so Teach Me became the obvious choice. That it’s a book about teachers certainly didn’t hurt either.
It will come as no surprise to any of the many who have read Dade’s books that of course, I loved this. It feels like so much of this year has been one long reading slump, with the occasional exception that lights up my life and where I finish the book in 24-48 hours. Teach Me was absolutely one of those books. I loved both Rose and Martin and while the American school system is rather different from ours (in Norwegian schools, you have exactly the same classes in secondary school no matter what your thoughts on higher education, while you apply for high schools based on your general interest and future plans – either vocational or prep for higher education). School management here prefers one teacher to follow their classes for the three years they go to secondary school, if at all possible (which is why I currently have only classes in tenth grade, all kids I’ve taught for three years and know really well). So what happens to Rose would be very unlikely to happen to me.
Full review (including ugly original cover art) on my blog.
