ARC Review: Bend Toward the Sun by Jen Devon

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Bend Toward the Sun Bend Toward the Sun by Jen Devon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3 stars

This seemed like the perfect book for me. It had an old rickety vineyard in a small town with two characters brought together with very different tragic backstories and was filled to the brim with overwrought descriptions of the farm and plants and even the dang fog. Total catnip to my purple prose Hallmark movie season of life.

Unfortunately, this book was not perfect for me. The first star I deducted is because Rowan (the female main character) was too much of a moldy cactus type where she had boundaries and million foot tall walls around her heart or some shit but never clearly expressed any of these to Harry (the male main character) and she instead came across as closed off and mean and disrespectful. I simply did not believe she had enough positive characteristics or was hot enough for Harry to try so hard and fall in love with her immediately because besides the being really into plants thing she basically had zero? A lot of the prickly pushiness Rowan had was romanticized towards the end and all she needed was to see Real Romantic Love to heal her! Girl, please.

One of the worst things Rowan did was never call Harry by his preferred name and instead she called him Harrison until about 60% of the book wherein she switched back and forth between Harry and Harrison depending on how she felt towards him. This is not cute and it is not romantic even if the author tried to explain it away at the end as Rowan's grandma saying nicknames are for people you love. Tell that to anyone who has ever played a sport ever. And a preferred name is not the same as a nickname! Respect the names people ask you to use for them as much as you'd respect the pronouns they ask you to use. Simple as that.

The other star was deducted because half the book is overly horny nonsense. Harry was popping boners everywhere and at one point Rowan felt up Harry's crotch while they were in a s'mores line at a family dinner where children were present. Why couldn't one of Rowan's thousand mysterious boundaries been about appropriate sexual behavior? Now s'mores are ruined forever.

I received an ARC copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

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