Review: Attraction by Penny Reid

Attraction by Penny Reid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a cute story. This is the first in a series of novellas, so it is fairly short and the audio is a very quick listen. This wasn’t at all what I expected. I was expecting your typical new adult story where the two main characters get together, have steamy interactions for most of the story, have conflict, resolve said conflict, and make up. This is not that at all. To be honest there isn’t much steamy stuff happening at all, though there is some.

This is the story of awkward, nerdy Kaitlyn Parker and playboy Martin Sandeke. Parker and Sandeke are chemistry lab partners, but they secretly like each other. That is the cute, fluffy, new adult part. He’s rich and her family is fairly famous. They are like different people when they are together, but they both have very distinct and strong personalities that challenge each other. Kaitlyn can’t figure out why Martin likes her, she certainly isn’t his type. Martin can’t figure out why Kaitlyn would do anything to help him out without requesting something in return or holding it over his head. Martin clearly has been used and hurt deeply by people who are supposed to care about him in his past. Kaitlyn likes her space, hasn’t really had much experience with boys, and she is kind of old fashioned when it comes affection as in ask before you touch.

Kaitlyn and Martin jet set away to his private island for spring break because he wants to convince her that he is interested in her. She ends up convincing her best friend to go with her on the trip. Martin is respectful enough of Kaitlyn, but upon finding out that she is inexperienced, he slows it way down. Kaitlyn tries to use her experience as a wedge between them so they can just be friends. She is convinced that Martin really just needs a friend who doesn’t care about his wealth and good looks. She sees him as a person, and wants nothing from him but conversation and human interaction. This friends is why he wants to be with her. She does not compute. This dialoge kind of gets old after a while, only because it is repeated a few too many times for my taste, but doesn’t at all bring the book down.

What I liked:
Katie is body conscious, but it is all self-imposed. While her mom was kind of robotic in her interaction with her, she was supportive and gave her great advice about not giving other people power over her and how she felt about her appearance. I think this is extremely important for young girls. Normally in YA or NA books the body image issues are because a family member has said something, usually a mother wanting her daughter to look a certain way. In Attraction, her mother tells her not to care what other people think and to love the skin she is in.

Kaitlyn wasn’t afraid to tell people to not touch her when she didn’t want them to and she wasn’t afraid to tell Martin what she liked and didn’t like. She told him when he was being a douche, and he responded appropriately. He didn’t get defensive or respond aggressively. He was respectful of her wants and needs, and took her words to heart. This is also important as I fear that many young girls are afraid to speak up, talk to their partners, say no, or tell people in general when they are uncomfortable or something is not right whether it is in an intimate situation or in a professional situation. I think both men and women are afraid to say something because they fear the repercussions. Kaitlyn wasn’t afraid to tell Martin that he was selfish or being a jerk, she didn’t care if that meant he wouldn’t be her boyfriend. I think that’s important.

What I didn’t like:
Kaitlyn has this need to always want to find and actual closet and hide in it. If the closet were figurative I’d get it, but the physical hiding thing was strange. She didn’t seem to have ever suffered from some traumatic event in her life that made her want to hide, and she wasn’t terribly shy. This was just weird quirk. I fully support wanting to be drama free, and maybe wanting to be invisible in uncomfortable situations, but the hiding in actual closets thing was just weird to me.

We don’t get enough of Martin’s back story. I’m hoping we get more in the next installments, and knowing that this is a novella you can’t really dock the author for not giving you more because it’s a serial. Martin is kind of a douche sometimes, but you don’t know why. He appears tortured and sad, but you don’t know why and he won’t talk about it. I feel like that’s coming, but we didn’t get it in this episode.

The cliffhanger ending. I hate cliffhangers! The plus side is the other 2 books are out.

View all my reviews