REVIEW: The Accidental Boyfriend by Lori Freeland
Content notes – might be mildly spoilery so I’ve hidden them behind a spoiler tag
Spoiler: Show
Dear Lori Freeland,
The Accidental Boyfriend popped up in my NetGalley choices earlier this year but it seems the book originally came out in 2023.
Jessica Grey, aka Jessica Thorne, is a 17-year-old debut author. She wrote a book on “Digireads” (which I think of as a kind of Wattpad) and it went viral. It was then picked up by a traditional publisher and it’s just about to be released. Jess is off to her first romance convention (which happens to be in her home town of Dallas) where her book will be officially launched. There’s a lot of excitement about her follow-up book too. The book, that is, that Jess has yet to write and which is due in mere days. Eep!
Jess feels like a fraud because she based her book, Haunted, on the diary of her mother at age 16 and 17 when she met and fell in love with “T”. Haunted uses direct quotes from the diary but Jess has fleshed out the story and provided a HEA from her own imagination. It’s not specifically stated but I think this is because the diary kind of ends as diaries are wont to do. Writing Haunted was a way for Jess to begin to process her grief over the loss of her mother two years earlier. Her mother is not dead. But something happened relating to her mother’s alcoholism and it caused an injury to Jess. As a result when Jess got home from the hospital she was told by her dad, Trevor Gray (a famous indie author in his own right), that he’d kicked her mother out, served her with divorce papers and filed a restraining order so there could be no contact between mother and daughter. Trevor was a career Marine and after he left the service he began writing special ops thrillers. He is present in the house but very much absent from Jess’s life. She feels abandoned and unloved by both parents and is desperate to do more than stalk her mother on social media. She wants her family back and blames herself (as children do, even though it’s not their fault) for the breakdown of her parents’ marriage. When she found her mother’s diary she was so taken with the story of her parents’ courtship and she doesn’t understand what went wrong.
Gabriel Wade is the 18-year-old star of a werewolf-based TV show. He’s in Dallas to (try to) see his mother. His mother is unwell and is in a facility which costs a lot of money each month. His older sister is in college and his mother, while a successful TV star, lost her own money and so it’s up to Gabe to pay for everything. There’s a problem on the show though and it looks like the only option is to sell the family home. This would solve the financial problems but his sister tells him she’ll never forgive him if he does. He hasn’t seen his mother since her took her to the facility and he’s struggling with all of it.
As it happens, Gabe is staying at the same hotel in Dallas the romance convention is being held and when he arrives, he is immediately smitten by the pretty brunette stumbling on the escalator. He notices something else as well:
“You had this lost look, like you were twisted up inside, and there was this second when I felt like whatever was twisting you might get what was twisting me.”
Jess stumbles off the escalator and into Gabe’s arms. Around the same time, a persistent reporter/paparrazzo tries to corner Gabe to question why he’s in town. He is contractually bound not to reveal the issues on the show and he’s bound by a promise he made to his mother to not reveal why she’s in care – so he begs Jess, his “Escalator Girl” to help him out and give her her very first kiss. From there, thanks to Jess’s agent and romance fairy godmother, a scheme is hatched for them to fake date for the week of the convention to boost each other’s image.
Both young people are dealing with some very serious issues and they’re both struggling. Jess has been home-schooled since her mother left and is very shy and innocent. Gabe is much more worldly but he’s been in show business his whole life. He grew up on “Raising Ryder” a TV series where his mother played his on screen mother and he’s been in the spotlight ever since. He doesn’t often get a chance to be “real”. With Jess, he does.
Gabe falls for Jess quickly and spends time trying to convince him to give him a chance for real rather than for pretend. He’s a very persuasive and charming young man, not to mention he’s hot. He is sincere though so I never felt like he was playing her. Jess is worried about his reputation (most of which is media spin) for being a girl-chaser and about his co-star, Kimberley Kane, who, according to the press, is his on-again-off-again girlfriend. Gabe has never actually dated Kim. They’re friends and it’s a contract/show/PR thing for them to appear to be together from time to time. Jess has fairly low self-esteem (not surprising given her feelings about and her experience with her parents) and has few friends in real life, especially since she left school after the thing happened with her mother and hasn’t really been in touch with peers since. She doesn’t believe she’s as pretty as she is. In another book this might have annoyed me but it made sense here.
Over the course of the book, Gabe and Jess fall sweetly in love. Gabe is far more sexually experienced that Jess (who has no experience at all apart from the kiss at the foot of the escalator) but Gabe is respectful of her boundaries. Their makeout scenes are actually pretty steamy but things stay outside of “swimsuit areas” – Jess is only 17, so this made sense to me, plus the book takes place over a short space of time. The pair certainly have chemistry and Gabe’s instinct about what’s twisting each of them up is spot on. They are able to help each other and support one another in ways not available to them from others in their lives. Ultimately, this gives each confidence to address the issues they’re facing and come to what resolutions they can about their respective parental relationships.
The Accidental Boyfriend is a charmingly easy read. The characters are engaging and doing the best they can in some very difficult circumstances. I did think the way things got sorted out between Jess and her dad was a bit hand-wavey. It was a bit too easy all things considered and I never did quite understand why he had been so distant with her. Then again, we only had Jess’s POV on that topic so maybe she was a little unreliable there? Parts of the story are a bit Cinderella but there are some things which cannot be waved away by a fairy-wielding magic wand and there are still hard choices to be made and hard things to be faced. On Jess’s side of things I thought the hard thing she had to deal with was extremely difficult and again, I thought there was a bit of hand-waving as to how she coped with it. I don’t want to give away spoilers but let’s just say that an adult in Jess’s life is not a good person.
Even though the protagonists were young, I believed in their HEA because the very hard things they were dealing with brought about a certain maturity (particularly for Gabe) and their bond was created in something of a crucible. But, they have fun together and relate to one another as young people. They do not come across as actually being 30.
While I had a couple of quibbles about some details towards the end, for the most part, I enjoyed The Accidental Boyfriend quite a bit.
Grade: B
Regards,
Kaetrin
Thank you for your nice review!