LOVE SONG

Two family friends fall in love as they spend the summer cohabiting at a lake house.

Blake Logan is in need of some major soul-searching. After discovering that her boyfriend, Isaac, has been cheating, Blake flees to her family’s shared summer home in Lake Tahoe. Isaac says Blake lacks passion, and the insult strikes a chord. It’s the summer before her senior year at Briar University, and Blake feels stuck in a dead-end broadcasting major with no idea what she wants to do with her life. She’s hoping a summer at the lake will give her time for introspection; that is, until her peaceful solo trip gets a little crowded. It turns out that Wyatt Graham, self-proclaimed heartbreaker and Blake’s unrequited crush, is also taking advantage of their families’ shared property. Wyatt, who’s four years older than Blake, is a songwriter who leaves a string of dejected women in his wake, and he’s looking to cure a bout of writer’s block at the lake. The last person he expected to see there was Blake, the one girl he can’t touch. He knows he’ll break her if he does…and that just might break him. Kennedy’s second-generation stand-alone romance jumps back into the world of her beloved Off-Campus characters and their grown children. In typical Briar U fashion, there are goofball friendships and steaming-hot sex scenes, but Blake and Wyatt’s relationship falls short of swoonworthy. Wyatt is cruel without reason, sometimes irredeemably so, and Blake doesn’t spend her summer on self-reflection as much as deflecting her housemate’s ire. Wyatt’s protectiveness borders on misogynistic rather than sexy, and after chapters full of fights and harsh comments, their eventual coupling just feels uncomfortable.

An off-key romance.