The Chase

okay. listen. i felt a little stuck in my emotions and reading pace with the books i was currently reading, and i couldn't sleep, so i picked up a book i knew specifically that i could 1) read fast, and 2) be entertained by. and i was! it did the job. which is why i think i'm rating this 3 stars instead of, more realistically, a 2.5.

there are things in this book i really liked, and things i REALLY didn't like. i'm a little frustrated, because this fell into a few misogynistic and traditional het romance tropes (bad, sexist ones) that ... i honestly didn't expect from this author. it felt a little surprising to see in here, actually. but it also had some decent topics and handled a few issues well. so idk?

while i didn't mind the pacing of this book (i actually liked the way their cat and mouse chase played out, maybe bc i did like both mcs) i was angry that the only thing really drawing them together/back towards each other that they were battling against was this like super base sexual desire. it wasn't super believable and got really annoying fast. you're telling me they can't stay away from each other only bc they're both wildly horny for each other? literally nothing else? nah bruh that ain't it. (there were MOMENTS where you saw it could be more, but then it was invalidated 10 pages later by a character's thoughts.) it kept trying to say “opposites attract” but not ONCE did i feel like they even liked each other. once they did get together i felt like that was solved, and actually then i was like oh they're so cute together lol, but it was the majority of the book of them fighting their lust only, so, like, yeah.

to touch some things i liked: fitz's struggle bc of how his parents treated him, and summer realizing she can't expect him to just jump 10 steps ahead of where he was at and instead meeting him where he was. i loved that a lot. also loved brenna (can't wait to read her book, tbh) and her friendship with summer. and the dialog, god, kennedy really makes me laugh super hard sometimes. i also liked how the professor subplot played out, and in conjunction to that, summer's internal struggle with her adhd. it was also fun to see some cameos from the off-campus series, esp tucker, who was my least fav, but so cute in this. baw.

an issue: male characters calling a woman a b*tch is just. not something i want to read, ever. i'm not even highly sensitive to the word, but just. stop. this word in general was used too much in this book imo.

one more issue: i was hyper aware of how “sexy” and perfect summer was, but never really felt like she had like. a single flaw or just normal human part of her ... which bugged me a LOT. it reduced her to such a sexual item on the page. i think if she hadn't had her arc of adhd struggle (which we'll get to in a second) she would have been completely unrelatable.

AND LAST ISSUE: as a woman with lifelong adhd, this rep was. hm. good and bad. i felt her struggle a lot with doing certain executive function things and feeling stupid. i REALLY felt that. but then there would be times when she called herself crazy, or became a LITTLE too much of a caricature of adhd, and that ... idk. i guess it fell a bit flat to me. i'm sure i'm hyper critical of it simply bc it's my very specific life experience. i would've liked it to have been explored a little more. it felt kind of surface-y. adhd ISN'T “ooh shiny things” but then there were parts where she'd mention her racing thoughts, or get overwhelmed trying to do a function and freezing, and that was realistic. i just ... i'm not sure if that really landed.

i know i'm harping on a lot of things, i did enjoy it, but i also still feel like romance, especially traditionally published heterosexual romance, needs to be picked apart and called higher lmao the bar is still SO low. i def will read the next book tho.