Another shiety adolescent novel! 😫🤮
Meet Wren! She has just entered her sophomore year of high school and is already anticipating her dreaded college applications 😬 On top of this, she works part-time at her family's banquet hall.
One night, while Wren is serving cocktail weenies during a wedding party, a boy suddenly begins to choke on the food. Thankfully Wren promptly dislodges the weenie, inadvertently saving his life.
The rest of the novel focuses on the love birds' infatuation with one another. Grayson (the choking victim from earlier) manages to locate the school that Wren attends. He even goes so far as to work alongside her as a server at the banquet hall! 😱
(Image created using an AI art generator on Night Cafe)
However, Grayson has a dark past: he was kicked out of school for selling test papers. On top of this, Grayson and some friends were intentionally playing with girls' feelings in order to gain access to their homes and rob them.
As the story progresses, so does their relationship, and more of Grayson's past is revealed. Wren catches Grayson flirting with another girl, but he assures her that he was only doing a favour for a friend and that he's officially done with his old group. The friend (Luke) ends up confronting Wren and telling her that Grayson is still a hound dog. She gets angry at Grayson, he finally tells her the truth (that he was sleeping with and robbing girls), and she breaks up with him before running off or whatever.
Then a few days pass, Wren realizes it wasn't that bad?, and she and Grayson get back together??
Here was the stupidest part of the entire novel! Wren concocts this "revenge scheme" in order to get Luke off Grayson's back -- for good!! 🥴 And that plan, is for her to lure Luke to the banquet hall with promises of hooking up, only Grayson will be waiting there in secret, so he can tell Luke he doesn't want to steal anymore? Except Luke already saw their plan coming, and one of his friends was secretly waiting for them the whole time?? Then Grayson and Luke get into a brawl.
The police magically show up? despite nobody calling them?? Then everybody is taken down to the station, and they're free to go after simply being questioned about the incident, no charges dropped 🥴🥴
Then the book nicely wraps itself up with Wren and Grayson going to dance during high school prom. That's it! lol
I normally don't indulge in teenage novels (for all of the above alone 🤦), but the title had enticed me with the promise of amazing -- and it was anything but!! 😩 The preview had also lured me in with a quote from the book:
"Since the night I saved him, I'd felt a magnetic pull toward Grayson so strong, it scared me."
I was thinking more along the lines of "saved from suicide attempt;" I didn't know it was going to be something as trivial as choking on a cocktail weenie! 😭 Lame!! lol...
The rest of the book's sustenance was pure cliché garbage! 🤢 A quiet girl who is shy around the badass guy because she doesn't recognize her own hotness. Her "stand," where her defining argument to her parents is, "I wanna make my own mistaakes!! 😠"
And the rising action -- uncovering Grayson's secrets -- wasn't even exciting, it was very anticlimactic... Oh no, a good-looking boy used to sleep around and made some mistakes? I literally laughed the whole time, going, "Just tell the truth, holy shit lol, how is this the main focus of the novel? 🥴"
On top of, am I the only one who finds it... weird when grown adults write on teenage experiences? Like... PDF, almost? 😅 They couldn't write a romance novel for their own age group? A female author reflecting her own personal experiences through a female character, sure fine, but I don't need a 30-year-old woman putting herself in a teenage boy's shoes, talking about his "desires" and "wanting to see more of her body/skin"? I dunno, again, just a bit weird for me!~ 😊
