Genre: NA, Romance, Contemporary
Pages: 352
Released on: August 26th, 2014
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Goodreads Summary:
Nadia Conrad has big dreams, and she’s determined to make them come true—for her parents’ sake as well as her own. But between maintaining her college scholarship and working at the local day care to support herself, she barely has time to think, let alone date. Then she moves into a new apartment and meets the taciturn yet irresistible guy in 1B….
Daniel Tyler has grown up too fast. Becoming a single dad at twenty turned his life upside down—and brought him heartache he can’t risk again. Now, as he raises his four-year-old son while balancing a full-time construction management job and night classes, a social life is out of the question. The last thing he wants is for four noisy students to move into the apartment upstairs. But one night, Nadia’s and Ty’s paths cross, and soon they can’t stay away from each other.
The timing is all wrong—but love happens when it happens. And you can’t know what you truly need until you stand to lose it.
My Review:
Not only does this book make a great pop culture reference to my childhood, but it is jam packed with sass, love, and steamy love scenes – everything I want in a new adult book.
The characters are super relatable. Like it’s almost scary how relatable they are. Since I am currently a second year in college and Nadia, our main character, is struggling through her own college stresses, and so are the rest of the characters, it just made it easy to recognize those problems and how stressful certain responsibilities could be. I felt it so closely because I’m currently going through some of them. So the fact that Ann Aguirre can make it so relatable for me, the reader, was awesome.
The main romance between Nadia and Ty was, gah, just gush worthy. There were times I wanted to hate Ty for his reasons of why they couldn’t be a thing, but hot damn how can you be mad at a guy who is putting his kid first?! There’s just no way. And so I fell in love with Ty super quick and just couldn’t find myself hating him at any point in the book.
I think what really strikes me in this book, what makes me bow down to it as a wonderful read, is that we see a really neat role reversal in this book. Most of the time, in books like this, we see the guy fighting for the girl and he shows up at her door, groveling and begging, maybe holding a bouquet of flowers to help ease the pain of heartache. But in this book, it’s the girl who’s doing most of the fighting. I was so pleasantly surprised by that because I was ready to be depressed along with Nadia and stuff our faces with ice cream and alcohol, but that’s not what happened. And it was so empowering to read about a female protagonist not wallowing in her pain, but channeling it and fighting for what she wants. Way to go, Nadia!
I am also a big fan of how the story was told. The narrator of Nadia is super self-aware throughout the novel. She’s telling us how it happened. It almost carried with it a “Once upon a time,” vibe which was cool. And I absolutely LOVE the Ever After portion of the book. It’s Nadia’s time for self-reflection and I felt her words all the way to my core.
Just an overall great, awe-inspiring book. I can’t wait to delve into the next book in this 2B trilogy!
MY RATING: 5/5
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