Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Audience: YA Contemporary Romance
Length: 464 pages
Author: Tashie Bhuiyan
Publisher: Inkyard Press
Release Date: May 4th, 2021
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads
BOOK SUMMARY:
A reserved Bangladeshi teenager has twenty-eight days to make the biggest decision of her life after agreeing to fake date her school’s resident bad boy.
How do you make one month last a lifetime?
Karina Ahmed has a plan. Keep her head down, get through high school without a fuss, and follow her parents’ rules—even if it means sacrificing her dreams. When her parents go abroad to Bangladesh for four weeks, Karina expects some peace and quiet. Instead, one simple lie unravels everything.
Karina is my girlfriend.
Tutoring the school’s resident bad boy was already crossing a line. Pretending to date him? Out of the question. But Ace Clyde does everything right—he brings her coffee in the mornings, impresses her friends without trying, and even promises to buy her a dozen books (a week) if she goes along with his fake-dating facade. Though Karina agrees, she can’t help but start counting down the days until her parents come back.
T-minus twenty-eight days until everything returns to normal—but what if Karina no longer wants it to?
GREAT CHARACTER JOURNEY.
A random selection because I was feeling a contemporary and this was available! And what do you know, I really enjoyed it. I flew through it quickly (one of my favorite aspects of contemporaries) and thought it was overall a charming book.
Karina goes on such a journey. Having anxiety as well, I felt seen by a lot of the portrayals of her anxiety. The counting and breathing, anxiety attacks and more. All things I know intimately that I connected with to Karina.
I absolutely adored the bad boy Ace. Oh my goodness, he was so stinkin’ cute. I loved his demeanor and when he whipped out a fake dating trope I was ecstatic. it played out well and the super cute scenes of them studying together, going on dates and meeting family had me grinning from ear to ear. I love the way he supported Karina and also respected her boundaries and time frame.
There’s not some wildly dramatic issue between them in the end. It’s more of a focus on Karina and owning who she wants to be and what life choices she has the right to make on her own. I cringed many times listening to the beratement from her parents and it broke my heart in two listening to her struggle to come to terms with pleasing them, and becoming a shadow of who she is. Luckily, this book ends on a sweet HEA.
Overall audience notes:
- YA Contemporary romance
- Language: some strong
- Romance: kisses
- Trigger/Content Warnings: emotional/verbal/psychological parental abuse, anxiety attacks, depictions of general anxiety
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