Just Friends

"<strong>Unoriginal, cliche, with a heavy dose of misogyny </strong><br/><br/>Emerson and Reed. Ugh. The author is obviously allergic to original ideas or thought so these 2 characters are the exact same characters that you've read in every other book in this young adults romance genre. She is almost perfect. Innocent, sweet, virginal. Reed is a supersized version of every douche canoe that came before him. He's 22. The world's greatest hockey player. The world's greatest lover and also it's greatest fighter. Take a drink everytime Reed growls of a groan rumbles up from his chest. I dare you. <br/><br/> Make no mistake about it. Read is one of the worst characters that has ever been created. The fact that the author thinks he is leading man in a romance material is laughable. When Emerson's ex boyfriend lets it leak that she's a virgin Reed becomes obsessed with her. He could be a good guy/friend and make her feel better, but of course he doesn't. He makes it his personal mission to humiliate her further by demanding answers that he doesn't deserve and forcing her to talk about it when she repeatedly says she doesn't want to. He tries to solve the problem by trying to force her to be in a fake relationship with him then having no clue why she wouldn't wanna do so because every other girl would kill for the opportunity. Seriously get used to this guy's ego if you're gonna read this book. It's ridiculous. Reid spends the majority of the book either upon gene or threatening every single God that even looks her way. There are multiple times where she's speaking to someone or having a good time with someone and he goes neanderthal on the guy and drags her way. His anger issues and violent tendencies are apparently romantic according to the author. It is actually uncomfortable for me to read from Reed's point of view because he takes ownership of her ******. She offers him the chance to be the guy and he refuses so when she goes looking for someone else he refuses that to. As if it's his decision. I'm not exaggerating when I say he threatens to fight at least 10 people in this book And he even goes so far as to tell us how one particular woman is "lucky" he didn't choke the life out of her. Lucky he didn't choke the life out of her. This is the guy you want us to root for? This is what you think is romantic? It's so cliche for the guy to be able to sleep with every woman he looks at but for the leading lady it's completely unacceptable for a to her to even dance with a guy. Ugh. The author then makes one of the dumber decisions I've ever seen. Emerson is a virgin so you would think when she actually has sex we would see it from her point of view, but for some reason we see it from Reed's. In fact every time they have sex or do anything sexual it's from his point of view. Only further cementing the authors infatuation with enforcing to us that sex is only for a man's pleasure and the woman just happens to be there. My favorite part came after their first time when Reed just has to ask her if it was good. Fun fact: if you have to ask, it wasn't good. Maybe it would have been if he would have allowed her to enjoy her 1st time the way she wanted. To allow hard to experience it the way she wanted but of course he had to do the alpha male thing and force her to look at him. Then continue to demand that she look at him if she dared close her eyes to actually try to enjoy it. Then when she finally does start to enjoy it the 2nd time he has to make sure that she explicitly tells him so that he can have his ego sufficiently stroked. This author just repeatedly hammers home to us what an awful person Reed is but I truly think she just doesn't see it. The author then continues her unoriginal novel by throwing in the moment that every book has to have. Their looking out at a nice view. The girl says how beautiful it is, the guy agrees that it's beautiful but hes not looking at the view. Can we please stop writing this scene? We get it. To wrap it all up apparently the author realizes she has somewhere to be in 10 minutes so she ends this book completely out of nowhere. There's a huge rift between the 2 main characters and then literally OUT OF NOWHERE she ends it in the most anti climatic way possible. This was an extremely lazy effort. Without tell you there was not one of original thought in this book I am completely serious. If you've read only 1 other book in this genre then you've read this 1. This book is only further proof that people who read romance novels will give 5 stars to literally anything that has a happily ever after. Stop settling for crap. Push these authors to do better and give us better characters. The bar is set so extremely low for the leading man in this genre but almost no author will give us any effort to even try to reach that low low bar. They keep giving us the same arrogant, chauvinistic characters over and over. Do better."