RECEIVED AN ADVANCED READER COPY IN EXCHANGE FOR A REVIEW
"Suddenly the ones who didn't do anything to help when I lost everything, want to rush in and 'rescue' me from the only man who did!"
With those words, Sara Hart O'Brie turned what might have been a harmless and cloyingly sweet little quickly-forgettable forbidden romance novel into a scathing commentary on the West's entire definition of adulthood. Pull up a chair and bring some popcorn (or maybe some chocolate ice cream), because there's a storm coming.
I'll start off by saying this is not my usual fare. It is, at its core, a romance novel, which is not something I would normally have read. With that said, the fact that I finished it at all is probably a testament to it being above the usual bar. Of course, it being a teacher-student romance will already make it... what's the current parlance for politically or culturally unnaceptable literature? "Problematic" is the word, I think. And yet, amid all the reasons why its very existence might raise eyebrows, it manages to actually make a point, something very few novels these days can say.
Let me get the things I didn't like out of the way first. The author is at such pains to remind the reader that Kat, the female-lead, is eighteen (even making the character herself repeatedly reiterate this refrain as a protest against the world she lives in) that I quickly reached the "okay, I heard you the first fifty times" point. Then again, considering that Julian, the male-lead, is forty, and amid the current cultural backlash against age-gap relationships, the author may have felt this was necessary to save her from allegations of encouraging violations of law. And of course, considering that the entire theme of the third act is Kat's insistence that she does indeed have agency and the right to decide her own relationships, this may have been a deliberate authorial decision.
The second thing that put me off a bit was the way the book seems to struggle to find its voice. It starts off feeling like a lighthearted, almost YA novel about a high schooler who has a forbidden crush on her teacher. I mean, have we or have we not seen this a few thousand times per month since the Bronze Age? Then in chapter 4 it dips almost-but-not-quite into erotica territory before switching to a slow-burn with a lot of will-they-won't-they tension, then throws a MASSIVELY dramatic and tragic plot twist at the readers about half way through. Then in the third act, the author seems to have finally decided she is on a mission to confront some of Western society's hypocrisy about young adults (namely, the question of "if an eighteen year old is an adult then why do we regard them as children when it comes to their ability to decide their own relationships?")
Now that that's out of the way...
There's plenty to like. For one thing, while the author doesn't shy away from erotic scenes, she also only includes them if they have a point in the story (typically either showing Kat's feelings change, or contrasting her perception of Julian to her perception of men her own age). There was never a moment where I felt like the author was trying to prudishly draw a curtain around the characters and pretend sex wasn't a major part of their thinking, nor was there a point where I felt like the author said "and now, before we continue our story, a word from our sponsor, Pornhub."
Yes there's eroticism, when there's a point to it.
Then, the tightrope between the main character's willing immersion into a relationship with an imbalanced power dynamic and her insistence on maintaining her own agency in that dynamic was skillfully handled (which won't surprise you if you've read any of the author's nonfiction work; I'll leave it at that). The pattern of her reasserting that agency as subtext through the history conversations with Julian not only managed to build anticipation but also reminded the reader "this is no dumb trollop. She's a dedicated, self-disciplined scholar with her eyes on an eventual Ph.D." The way she re-emphasizes this through witty historical banter was also, for me, the source of several "Robert Muldoon moments:" 'clever girl...'
The way the author slips in mentions of the background music here and there struck me as a great tone-setting tool, even if the overabundance of 1980's music among the list did defy credulity a bit in 2025 (and pardon my saying this but if the author really is 22, as some of her work claims, then I suspect she had a ghost-writer for the music references because nobody under 40 has heard of half of these songs that get their names dropped; or, by saying that, am I showing exactly the hypocrisy she's out to criticize? Hmmm...). The way she selected these songs thematically was absolutely chef's kiss, and in the climactic scene (no spoilers but it takes place at a prom) I could see from a mile off how the song was going to be the clue-by-four that influenced Kat's final decision. Even so, I was practically singing the chorus by the time it came along and I found my stoic, cynical self grinning and saying out loud, "go get him, young lady."
(Minor spoiler ahead)
But frankly, I think the most daring thing the author did was to give the characters a happy ending at all. The entire basis of the conflict was "the law says we can, but society says we can't," and the third act was built around society trying to tear the two characters from each other. The fact that the author refused to end this book with the characters tragically succumbing to that, was a powerful statement, as if the author was standing right beside Kat and saying "I am an adult and will do this my way."
Bottom line: it's one part romance novel and one part New-Adult drama. I don't read either of those genres and even I liked this one.
Well done, Mrs. O'Brie. Or perhaps I should say...
"Good girl."