Review + Giveaway: Love and Candy by Elizabeth Famous

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Blurb:

LOVE and CANDY is a contemporary New Adult or Young Adult romance. It’s about a young woman’s coming of age and takes place in the sexually-charged environment of a posh high school. It doesn't shy away from the gritty details of the main character's first serious relationship and deals with very adult topics. The love interest is a seriously tortured guy, far from a prince charming.

Here's the back cover blurb:

Samantha Montclare is not who she thought she was. Straitlaced and academically minded, she's knocked to her knees by an unexpected infatuation with the star of her local soccer team just as she discovers that her biological father is not the loving dad who raised her but a forbidding Italian aristocrat. 

Within the social hierarchy of a wealthy suburban high school, Delaney Troy is so superior to naive Samantha that she can't speak to him without provoking obscene taunts from his friends. 

Delaney is gorgeous, but much of Samantha's fascination stems from his brazen honesty and bristling wit. His air of confidence inspires so powerful an interest he draws her in without even looking at her.

But how could she possibly date a guy like Delaney who insists he only wants to hook up -- and doesn't believe in love?

Will the scandalous truth about the circumstances of her conception threaten her happy home life? 

Must she find a place in her life for an alarming new "father" just as she’s becoming an independent young woman?

Get it here:

Amazon

Review:

At first glance, Love and Candy is your typical young teenage girl has huge crush on gorgeous popular star athlete boy. However, as dive deeper and deeper into this story you’ll find that like most books you can’t judge it by its cover and it becomes something of a tail of teenage drama mixed with a confusing situation, that may just turn into something more.  Samantha Montclare is a freshman when we meet her and always considered the nerdy girl. She gets straight A’s, wants to go to an Ivy League school and generally stays out of trouble. That changes when she lays eyes on Delaney Troy, the star of the boys’ soccer team at Darcy High and can’t seem to keep him out of her mind.  After more than a year of hard crushing and putting up with the humiliation of his popular friends knowing she had said crush something changes. Can Samantha actually get what she wants from this crush? And can someone like Delaney really be boyfriend material or is she going to end up with a broken heart?

There is A LOT going on in this story. Between her family situation (which completely took me by surprise BTW) and Delaney there is nothing to wonder about why Samantha’s emotions are all over the place at points in this book. In fact there were points that I got really angry with her actions and thoughts. I really thought I hated her as a character but then I stopped and thought about it some more. She is 16 when we start this book and she is falling in love for the very first time. When I thought about it that way, I understood this character. She is young, she is in high school and we all made poor decisions when we were that age. I didn’t like how Delaney treated her at first, and I certainly hated the fact she was used or bullied for a good portion of this book but I came to conclusion that Samantha has a character flaw; she is not a flawed character.  I came to like the fact that she has a huge heart and was willing to hurt inside just to care about someone else the way she did with Delaney.  I still think he didn’t deserve that love but I liked Samantha none the less.

Overall I really enjoyed this book, like I said before it took me by surprise more than once so any time a book does that I give it the thumbs up.  The beginning for me was something I should mention. I thought it was a bit all over the place, I thought we flashed back at one point but I may be mistaken and I was a little confused. Once it straightened itself out, however, I dove head first into the story and never looked back. I thought it a great message and a character that most people that went through high school can relate too and that brought an additional quirk to the book. It does contain sexual topics but I felt any story with characters this age is going to have that involved. It is a conversation piece about what teenagers are doing and how parents handle things involving them so I can see this being one of those Mother-Daughter reads that you start a conversation with, if you’re brave enough for that (I know I wouldn’t be!), but if you enjoy a coming of age type story, this book is for you.  –My Opinion: Buy it!


About the author:
Elizabeth Famous grew up on a family farm in rural USA before dashing off to the big city and going Ivy League.  Never satisfied with doing things the usual way, she married a man from the other side of the globe and won a doctoral fellowship in humanities.  Raising her lively and opinionated children is the greatest challenge of her life.  She likes to write about flawed characters dealing with challenging situations not touched upon in traditional romance novels -- such as losing one’s virginity in a not all-together spectacular fashion and yet getting together with the same guy by the end of the story, like in LOVE and CANDY.

Check her out:
Author Website
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