**ARC provided in exchange for an honest review**

When I first picked up this book, I’m not quite sure what I expected but this for sure wasn’t it. To Be Your Girl is a new adult romance novel about Haley and how she comes to fall in love with her love interest, Cade. The two characters have immediate chemistry and through the course of the book have to overcome many obstacles. Some of those included abandonment and interference from other people. I would consider it an erotic novel (for some reason I wasn’t expecting that, even though I know sexual exploration is a pretty big trope in NA literature. I’m not counting this against the novel though). As you can tell by its star rating, I am not a fan of this novel. However, before we get into the cringe worthy and downright problematic, let’s talk about the good.

The Good

I liked that we had a pretty clear sense of who Haley is right from the beginning. We know her family dynamic and the emergence of her relationship with Cade felt natural. I felt like her feelings about photography and her father were well-written and felt very organic.

The Bad

every non-major character felt frivolous to the story. The author regularly included new characters, and gave us context on who likes who and what their dynamic are, only for that same person to never show up again. Every friend of Haley’s really felt like her talking piece. For instance, her friend Court. We don’t really learn anything about her except for the fact that she’s very attractive and nice and the whole package. She’s the perfect friend and the perfect woman with the best advice for Haley. But when does Haley reciprocate that? I felt that way for many of Kennedy’s characters. They just weren’t fleshed out enough, and were irrelevant to the story.

Haley is very misogynistic and hypocritical towards women. If Haley views another woman as “competition,” they’re almost always portrayed as slutty, even after she turns around and does the same things she’s so disgusted by! It’s incredibly frustrating to read and I hate when authors reduce female-to-female interaction to exclusively cattiness and microaggressions.

The characters didn’t follow linear growth. Basically, it never felt like the characters grew or learned from their mistakes. It felt very abrupt, with each character just reacting to the situation, instead of reacting the way I would expect that character to react in that situation. It made them feel wishy-washy, like they didn’t know what they wanted. This in turn, made their declarations of love and their outbursts seem insincere.

There was more that frustrated me. However, I am not going to spend more time explaining my thoughts. It’s mostly just variations of the same points I previously stated. I haven’t read Rae Kennedy’s other works so maybe this is just an outlier, but I think this book just wasn’t my cup of tea. Maybe I will like her other works more.

I don’t usually like giving one star reviews, just because it feels so mean spirited, and as a writer myself, I know how much criticism can crush you. Hopefully, this will be helpful, though.

**ARC provided by Netgalley and corresponding publisher in exchange for an honest review**
All opinions are entirely my own.