When the publisher offered me this ARC, I had extremely high hopes. I’ve spent a decent bit of time in the English literature side of academia, and while I’m now studying a different field, I do still very much miss it. And on top of that, we’ve got an academic rivalry going on! In the end though, while this book does deliver on a lot of what I was expecting from it, it entirely fumbled the ending, and there were also a few writing choices/quirks that kept frustrating me throughout.

For the majority of this book, the only thing that frustrated me was certain aspects of the writing style. The biggest issue I had here was the random use of Covid-19/a pandemic, with references sporadically mentioned throughout the book. It was such a rare occurrence that it was entirely unnecessary to even write the pandemic into this book’s story world, in my opinion, as the only times it was even brought up were to mention that the MC’s junior year sucked due to it, that she still carried a mask ‘just in case’, and that her dad considered it just a flu and that everyone else had overreacted. It added absolutely nothing to the plot and only served to take me out of the story, as I tried to ponder the timeline of the book and the necessity of these references. For other readers, these small lines will be enough to not even bother reading the book (fairly), as it can remind them of the traumatic events they might have experienced during the pandemic. Additionally, seeing a story world that is safely beyond the pandemic can be frustrating for readers, because we ourselves are still stuck in it. It’s better all-around to simply not even mention it if there is literally no point (and there isn’t!) to these small mentions, as a lot of us read romance to escape, not to be reminded of the struggles of our own real worlds. On top of this, there are also many moments where the writing style feels overly opinionated, which serves to push away readers that don’t agree. This might sound a bit like nitpicking, but when this genuinely caused me to put the book down and text the people around me for their opinions, I feel like it’s a valid complaint. (Some examples of these texts: ‘Do you consider Dr. Martens to be boots?? Because this author seems to not?’ and ‘Wait do people generally not like the actor for Anakin Skywalker in the prequels? Because I’d always assumed people generally liked the guy in the Star Wars fandom and yet this random love interest hates him enough to rant during an entire movie about it’). All of these are throwaway lines that add absolutely nothing to the plot or characters in any way at all but occurred frequently enough that I kept being taken out of the story. It just was not something I’d really encountered this frequently in a story like this before, and just kept frustrating me.

Honestly, for most of this book, I was sitting at around 3 to 4 stars rating, 4 when I was feeling nice and enjoying the banter, and a 3 when those writing quirks were just especially taking me out of the book. I was still having a genuinely nice time, seeing all these literary references (even if I was never into medieval lit myself), and watching the characters grow together despite their rivalry. But then, I hit the final 20% of this book and it just, collapsed for me. I think it’s largely due to too much going on that by the end, it was impossible to properly tie everything up in the space left. Most of the side plots suddenly felt like they had a bow stuck on top of them and all was good now (especially true for the friendship and father side plots), and the rush made some wrapping up feel more ridiculous than sweet or cute (namely the romantic plot resolution). The worst part was that all of this was happening at a funeral, the presence of which felt sudden enough on its own, and logically it did not make sense that everyone came to the funeral to wrap up all these story plots. We just kept having a resolution occur only for it to be quickly shoved aside, just so the next thing could be resolved, all the while the MC is accepting condolences? And lastly, I was just extremely frustrated with how the romantic relationship broke apart and was fixed in this last bit, and personally it relied just way too much on the MC just plain ignoring the love interest, and the love interest being, very not smart in the way he chose to do things, even if he’d seen how things had gone down similarly before.

Overall, I had really high hopes for this book, and it just didn’t end up working for me in the end. While there were aspects I enjoyed, especially the academic settings and references + having a fat MC where the focus wasn’t on her losing weight, and she loved herself as she was, they were overshadowed by, everything else. I may give another book from this author a chance in the future, but this one just wasn’t for me!