Hoo boy, this was a struggle. The premise of this romance is so my jam, but I never quite got on board with this one. The meet-cute is so great: oddball lit student accidentally turns in her erotic short story instead of the real assignment, professor sees all sorts of potential. Yes please!

I’m all for escapism and brain candy, but it still needs to be believable. Not only were the characters’ voices wildly anachronistic, but they were also indistinguishable. And there’s no way a modern professor, no matter how old-fashioned, wouldn’t have an email address. What started out as a strong idea quickly fell apart, and the plot fell into a sluggish tar pit of pacing.

Aside from the inconsistencies, my biggest pet peeve was the overly repetitive sentence structure that kept showing up over:

“Everyone, that is, except for Lukas. Oh, God, why did it have to be everyone except for Lukas?”

and over:

“…and that’s before he kisses me again. Oh, God, how he kisses me again. He does it once, softly, so softly.”

and over again:

“But it is, it is, oh, it is. In our love story, it is.”

The first time it showed up I thought it was compelling and breathless, but by the end of the book, having read it several times per chapter, I was close to pulling my hair out.

I tried to love this book, but there were just too many things that took me out of it and back into my super skeptical reality.
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