Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood was the 52nd book I read this year. If you are regular reader of this blog you know that I looooove her books, so be prepared for a fairly biased review.
You can read a complete review of every Ali Hazelwood book I’ve read here.
An attempt at summarising
Maya, the sister of the MMC we meet in Not in Love, has a secret, actually she has a few but she’s not going to ruin her brother’s wedding with them. The story flashes between the present day at the wedding, where Maya and her brother’s best friend, Conor, are on the outs after some mysterious falling out and the past, when Conor and Maya begin talking while she’s in College.
Over the book it emerges that they became friends, and, apart from one incident, it was never more than that because of Conor’s concerns over their age gap and different places in life. In the present we learn that the falling out was due to Conor stomping on their relationship to stop it once and for all, presuming he knows best and Maya is roiling against her lack of agency in all of this. No longer a damaged, stupid kid, Maya know what she wants and who she wants. She’s afraid of letting down her brother and of pursuing what she really wants in life, but as she sees her brother achieve a dream he never thought possible, it makes her even more determined to go after her future full force.
My thoughts
The title of this one is a bit misleading, because it is not a problematic summer romance at all! Their relationship has real foundations in a several year’s long friendship, albeit one fraught with lots of sexual tension. I liked the dreamy depictions of the destination wedding set against Maya’s life in Scotland at College. You get a real sense of her character journey as she recovers from the loss of her parents and the shock of how different her brother’s upbringing had been (they are more than ten years apart). The barrier in this story isn’t even that it’s her best friend’s brother, it’s that Connor is so determined to not be like his father, chasing younger women with a huge power imbalance, that ignores Maya’s wishes entirely. Honestly, it ends up being the lead problematic age gap romance I’ve read!
Although this was an enjoyable read and I loved that we got see character’s from Not in Love and Deep End in this book, which is something Ali hasn’t done before, this book didn’t really stand out for me otherwise. I didn’t love it as much as her previous two but I can’t really pin-point why? I guess the conflict didn’t really feel like a conflict to me? It was definitely slower paced than some of her others. I think we are building to more related books though and I’m excited to see where that goes.
Antonia Bernardin 