Clearing out my Kindle, Part 5
4 weeks to find Mr. Right?
No problem.
At least not for Hannah Stark.
The straight A high school senior has never met a challenge she couldn’t conquer.
With 4 weeks left before graduation she’s determined to land a date with her lifelong crush, Harrison Cohl.
The problem?
He’s Stanton Prep’s most popular bachelor!
But like all things in life, Hannah believes practice makes perfect.
Her plan?
Bribe bad boy, Cody Matthews into teaching her everything he knows about dating.
He’s the perfect guy for the job.
Quiet, broody, outcast . . . she’d never fall for someone like him.
And if Cody wants Hannah to continue tutoring him so he can graduate, he can’t say no.
I mean what’s the harm?
Fake feelings can’t get you hurt, right?
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Hannah Stark has done the right thing her entire life. She has worked hard to be the best in school, to get the best grades, and get into the best college. But, when it comes to writing her valedictorian speech, she looks up other people’s speeches for inspiration, and realises that they all talk about their high school memories, and about their friends. That is something she never made time for in high school – being a teenager.
Desperate to get in with the ‘Goldens’, the highest on the social ladder at Stanton Prep, Hannah consults, or rather blackmails, Cody Matthews. He used to be a Golden, before his fall from grace involving a drunken car crash, a dead girlfriend, and various other things, like juvie and rehab. But still, he knows how to get in with the Goldens, how to get into the biggest party to be thrown at the end of the year.
Cody quickly realises Hannah is more of a lost cause than he originally thought. She has no experience with anything, and clearly won’t fit in with the Goldens. There is no way they would ever take her in. But, she has this pesky little idea that practice makes perfect, and Cody finds himself a part of a fake relationship, wherein he will teach Hannah how to be a normal teenager, and Hannah will not turn in his real test scores and make sure he doesn’t graduate.
Hannah, though, starts to learn that Cody also isn’t quite who everyone thinks he is. He isn’t a degenerate kid who killed his pregnant girlfriend in a drunk driving crash and just moved on, he was greatly affected by everything that happened. He has panic attacks, and can’t talk about what happened. He has been thrown aside by everyone, just when he needed them. His old friends mock him, making jokes about what he is most sensitive about. Hannah might need Cody in order to get into the party, but it quickly becomes clear that Cody might need Hannah as well.
Hannah is incredibly naive and trusting of the people around her, but, I suppose, she has no reason not to trust them. It does not take reading many YA romance books to know that the Goldens are unlikely to be nice people, or have good intentions, but Hannah is determined. Practice makes perfect, and she has to be the best. The Goldens are the highest on the social ladder, and so they are who she must befriend. Her naïvety, though, isn’t annoying. You don’t get mad at her cluelessness, but rather, you fear for her, and hope she can make the right decisions. She is an incredibly likeable character.
Cody, also, is a character I could not help but like. He has everything going against him, and yet, he is immediately a contradiction. He is described as moody, dangerous – and yet, Hannah wakes him up at five in the morning, and he is sarcastic, and likes making her blush and laugh. The Cody we spend time with isn’t the Cody other people describe, so while you may be a little wary of him, it is almost impossibly not to fall in love with him as you read.
Hannah and Cody’s relationship is a complicated one, to say the least. She is technically using him, and he is just along for the ride. A fake relationship, one that should be shown, or dumped, when beneficial. But, neither Hannah or Cody seemed to be able to spend that amount of time pretending to be intimate without feelings starting to stir. While Hannah may not be entirely sure about what she is feeling, Cody is certain, and that is dangerous. He can’t lay his heart out for someone else, not after he lost Elena. But, being around Hannah takes away the pain. Their relationship is built on make-believe, but pretend doesn’t make you feel like that.
Sometimes, you just want a quick romance book to read, and sometimes, you want a bit more than that. This had that bit more, with some darker themes running alongside Hannah’s quest, mainly revolving around the car crash and Cody trying to deal with the repercussions, both to his mental state, and with the reactions of everyone around him. I loved reading this, and would definitely check out more books by this author.
Author, Christina Benjamin, lives in Florida with her husband, and character inspiring pets, where she spends her free time working on her books, eating chocolate and drinking wine.
Christina is best known for her bestselling Young Adult romance novels, The Prep School Boyfriend Academy series, which proves that book boyfriends are like chocolate… you can never have enough. Check out the series for fast, fun, YA romance reads. These destination novels let you fall in love in a new city with new characters, every time.
Make sure to check out her newest series, How To Date a Tomboy, for some YA sporty fun.
And don't miss her new Billionaire Boyfriend series for fun and flirty romance reads.
Christina loves to read and write across genres. She also writes under C.J. Benjamin and her best-selling novel, Geneva Sommers and the Quest for Truth, (FORMERLY THE GENEVA PROJECT) has won multiple awards and stolen the hearts of YA readers everywhere. Packed with magic and imagination, her epic tale of adventure hooks fans of mega-hit YA fiction like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Percy Jackson.
To Find info about all of her books and sign up for her newsletters please visit: www.crownatlanticpublishing.co
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