Title: Close To Me
Author: Monica Murphy
Release Date: February 11, 2020
★
**Kindle Unlimited
Asher Davis. My first crush.
My first kiss.
The boy who ripped my heart out of my chest again and again. Over and over. I let him have it every single time.
Willingly.
We are that toxic high school couple you hear about, the one you witness in the hallway avoiding each other. You laugh at them in class when they’re forced to work together, their gazes full of hatred. We are the couple you gossip about when they win homecoming prince and princess their sophomore year…
The back and forth is what kills me the most. I’m not his princess, I’m the girl he toys with when he’s bored. And he’s definitely not my prince, no matter how badly I want him to be.
Our senior year and we’re months away from never having to see each other again when disaster strikes—and brings us closer together. All it takes is one touch, and I’m burning for Ash. Hotter than I ever have.
But will that burn turn into a devastating fire? Or can we actually make it work this time?
"Ash and I are a total cliché." ~ Autumn.
Accurate.
Oof. This blurb does not represent this book. Like. Seriously. Also, heads up, I say "shit" a lot in this review. You've been warned.
This is another one of those times where I feel like I read a different book than other reviewers because I just did not like this book at all. It had a great premise and for maybe the first half I actually thought I was really going to enjoy it and it was going to go somewhere good. And then.
Autumn... What can I say about Autumn? I can't stand Autumn and I seriously suspect she's the #1 reason I didn't like this book. She is definitely the biggest problem with the story, in my opinion. I can actually forgive a lot of things in teenage girls in books, because I remember being a teenage girl and how absolutely unhinged with emotions girls can be at that time, but Autumn was just absurd and there was no real reason for it. Her whining and tendency to fall, completely without any reasonable explanation, into HE DOESN'T WANT ME, HE'S JUST MESSING WITH ME just completely wore me out throughout this book. Honestly, I just hated her and I think that the fact that her wishy washy shittiness and tendency to invent angst was really sort of the driving conflict of the story is what made it fall flat for me.
I felt like Asher could have been really interesting, but in the context of the story, his relationship with Awful Autumn, and the fact that he sort of devolved into a stereotype of the tortured teenage guy who has JUSTSOMANYFEELINGS and doesn't know what to do with them just made him really off putting to me. Also, to be really honest, I feel like if you're going to have a character who's super tortured with this really bad home life and all of these problems, but he's a solid student and a star football player... you've gotta explain that somehow. Not saying it can't happen, but it certainly wasn't believable here.
Generally, I really like the whole forced proximity trope, I feel like it's a good driving force for a romance novel, but in this one it just rubbed me wrong. Autumn's family was just weird and written in a way that didn't make a single bit of sense to me. There was a real lack of consistency with her parents who were sometimes a little too cool with everything and other times overly conservative. Also, the way her mother talked to Asher made me seriously uncomfortable. I think it was supposed to be like... supportive or something, but it just felt creepy and without boundaries. Her brother, though consistent in his characterization, was very much the same kind of shitty that his sister was, without any believable motivation for it.
I almost DNF'd this book at about 75% when OF COURSE there was another scenario of invented angst that didn't even a little bit make me care about the story or the characters or believe for a second that it would have any bearing on the story - and it didn't. And then at 79% Autumn made me hate her even more with her shitty, flailing angst demon on an inner monologue, so I almost DNF'd again. At 89% when the book took another ridiculous left turn into crazytown, I jotted down in my notes, "Fuck this book. Why am I forcing myself to finish this trash fire?" Seriously, I don't know if it's because I was just so over it at that point, but the closer I got to the end, the more I loathed this book.
Ugh, I'm getting angry writing this review, so I'm just going to stop. There's not much more I can add, I feel like I've really underlined my feelings on this book.
Anyway, lots of people did like this book, if the reviews are anything to go on, so maybe you'll like it too? I don't know. I certainly can't recommend it because I truly, truly hate it. So there's that.
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