Rating: 2.75 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novel
Carter and West have been best friends for a while. They now live together in college, along with a group of friends. West has always considered himself straight and never realized that Carter was in love with him. It’s their junior year and things start to shift for West when Carter goes out on dates. West doesn’t realize that what he feels is jealousy.
Carter doesn’t understand why his dates never work out for him. He’s hesitant to try online dating and prefers to meet people in person and, while he’s in love with West, he’s trying to find someone who loves him back. When West tells Carter he’s interested in men and asks for his help to see what that might be like, Carter is all in. That is, until feelings get blurred and truths are uncovered and Carter and West have to figure out where the lines of friendship and relationship meet.
I have great opportunities to try new books and new authors and, when I see friends-to-lovers stories, I will be interested time and again. However, this book is a debut and it didn’t give me what I was looking for. Carter and West are already deep into their friendship and in college when the story starts. That would have been fine, but their relationship and the overall story felt bland and flat.
We get alternating POVs from both West and Carter, but their voices sound too similar and, at times, it was easy to lose track of who was speaking. All of their roommates, who look to be getting books in this series, sound the same as well. The story has an easy premise, with West getting jealous of Carter’s dates and devising a plan to be with him. There is some deception and miscommunication and it felt uninspired and lacking for me.
The ending jumped ahead to the future several times, with an epilogue, and then an extended epilogue. We are told what happens, not shown what happens, and I didn’t feel enough of an emotional bond created with these characters to make that style work. Much of the story read as juvenile and unpolished for me and I have seen this trope before done better.
