First and Forever

• no spice • sports / football romance • insta love • fake dating • banter • dual POV || I love and adore Lynn Painters writings - but this one is a tiny exception, I guess. At first, I was gone, it was perfect, I loved the setting, the characters, the tension, but sadly, it suddenly felt flat, because there was like no developement.... and tbh it was kinda cringe-y how Duffy know like EVERYTHING football about Connor (like the span of his hands) and mentions it like 12892805 times, not kidding. If you want to read about a die-hard-fan and a tight end to fall in love and obsess about each other - here you go, but be warned: Duffy acts oblivious the whole damn time and so the plot moves slower and slower.

In the novel “First and Forever” the main character Duffy ends up in a fake relationship with a very well known football player. Duffy and her family always had been football fans, so this is very exciting for everyone involved. Pretty quickly, more than just a pretend relationship happens between Duffy and her football player. Usually I’m a huge fan of Lynn Painters adult books, that's why I’m really sad to say that this book felt pretty superficial. For one it did not even feel like one of her adult romanced. Regarding the spice and the characters mentality it felt more like her YA books like “better that the movies” It felt like a lot of tropes were just given on paper but not really written out. Technically there were a lot of side characters like Duffy’s best friend or her brothers but they were only really mentioned in passing, you never learned anything about them. Furthermore I felt like Duffy’s relationship with her father had some toxic aspects to it. I kept hoping that there would be a conversation about it at one point, sadly this never happened. Her father kept on crossing her boundaries and holding her to extremely high standards which comparing to her three brothers just felt unfair. Last but not least Lynn Painter builds the whole fake dating situation around the fact, that Duffy got sexually assaulted by the Teams Mascot on live TV, yet it’s never really taken seriously and in the epilogue its even made fun of. I’m really sad to say that a lot of aspects of this book irritated me and I wished would have been handled differently. In my opinion it doesn't even comes close to her other adult romance novels. However “First and Forever” is a cute sports romance book, the chemistry between the main characters is through the roof and the book ends in a wholesome found family situation. If you're looking for a light summer read this could still very much please you.