REVIEW: Love Song by Elle Kennedy
Content warning: Spoiler alert – don’t click if you don’t want to know
Spoiler: Show
Dear Elle Kennedy,
Blake Logan (only daughter of John Logan and Grace Ivers from The Mistake) has a bad breakup with her boyfriend and heads to Lake Tahoe and the house co-owned by the Logans and the Grahams and where the entire Off Campus/Briar U crew summer each year. She’s surprised to find she’s not alone – musician Wyatt Graham (son of Garrett Graham and Hannah Wells from The Deal and twin brother of Gigi Ryder (nee Graham) from The Graham Effect) is there. He’s suffering from (song)writer’s block and he’s left his home in Nashville and settled in at the lake, hoping the change of scenery will free his creative juices.
Blake is nearly 21, Wyatt is 24. When she was 16 she confessed her crush to him only to be rebuffed. And two years earlier, they had a late night encounter at Christmas where things started heating up. But Wyatt told her he didn’t remember it the next morning (even though he, of course, did) and nothing’s happened since.
Both Blake and Wyatt have imposter syndrome. Both worry they’re not good enough. For Blake, she thinks she’s not as beautiful as supermodel Alex Tucker or as talented as Gigi Ryder (or Wyatt Graham for that matter). She’s a bit at a loss as to what she wants to do with her life and feels under pressure to do something amazing like just about everyone in her orbit – and fears she’s destined to be ordinary. Wyatt feels he’s let his father down by not loving hockey and he’s extremely touchy about accepting any help of any kind professionally from his super-successful composer and Grammy Award-winning music producer mother.
Wyatt is also a restless guy, finding it hard to settle in one place. His head is always “full of noise” and he’s a chronic insomniac.
Neither are pleased to see one another in Lake Tahoe.
However, both are there to stay for the summer so they reluctantly call a truce.
Wyatt has wanted Blake since she confessed her crush (or at least, shortly after) but she was too young then. She’s older now but she’s still the daughter of his dad’s best friend and Wyatt knows he’s not relationship material. He has a well-deserved reputation as a fuckboy. He doesn’t want to hurt Blake so he’s tried to stay away from her. For Blake, it’s easy to believe that Wyatt just isn’t into her.
Over the course of the summer however, they become closer friends and the attraction that simmers between them becomes impossible for them to ignore. Still, given Blake is destined to go back to Briar for her final year of college and Wyatt will head back to Nashville, they agree no matter what, to preserve their friendship and they will have a fling only; each will walk away at the end of the summer.
I found the beginning section a little slow-moving. There was a significant portion of the book where Blake and Wyatt are building their friendship and another long stretch when they start having various kinds of sex except for the penis-in-vagina kind. It was a very extended kind of foreplay. Having grown up together, Blake and Wyatt were friends well before the book begins. While it’s true they get to know one another in a different and more intimate way (and I don’t mean sex specifically here) in those first few weeks, things could have been sped up a little story/page-wise without losing anything.
Blake and Wyatt are alone together in the house for weeks before their respective parents and the rest of the Off Campus/Briar U families (well, almost all of them – the Davenports are mostly absent) descend on them. Once everyone else arrives, things become a bit chaotic. The cast expanded significantly and I admit I found it a little hard at times to work out who belonged to who – most all of the children (mostly adults now) of the OG couples are there and it’s a lot. The bonus of this section is the various group chat messages – “Dad Chat” and the separate family group chats – which are full of the huge egos of their respective male leaders and pretty hilarious. I mean, who’s not here for Dad Chat??
Once everyone else arrives, the tension builds because Blake and Wyatt are kind of desperate for one another but constrained by the presence of so many others in the house – not least of which are the dads. This goes as well as might be expected.
The book takes a turn then (refer to the spoilerific content warning above at your own risk) and the tone changes. The couple spend some time apart. This bit was more episodic and skips over chunks of time. I found myself with a few questions, particularly about Wyatt and what he was thinking and doing. Wyatt’s growth and change over the course of the book was significant but it sometimes felt like I was told about it rather than shown/shown how it occurred. Of course I believed he loved Blake but I struggled a little with her being the answer to most of his problems.
Much of the attention was on Wyatt and his “demons” but Blake had just as many. It felt like they were given less attention than they warranted and had to be wrapped up quickly to get to the HEA.
The banter between the two love interests was excellent and the sex scenes were very hot – I certainly believed in Wyatt and Blake as a couple and I enjoyed their journey but I don’t think it’s the strongest book in the series.
Grade: B
Regards,
Kaetrin
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