Title: Last Will and Testament (Radleigh University #1)Author: Dahlia Adler
Publisher: Self-Published
Release Date: December 9, 2014
Genre/Age Group: New Adult, Realistic Fiction, Contemporary Romance
Source: Purchased
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Rating:
Lizzie Brandt was valedictorian of her high school class, but at Radleigh University, all she's acing are partying and hooking up with the wrong guys. But all that changes when her parents are killed in a tragic accident, making her guardian to her two younger brothers. To keep them out of foster care, she'll have to fix up her image, her life, and her GPA—fast. Too bad the only person on campus she can go to for help is her humorless, pedantic Byzantine History TA, Connor Lawson, who isn't exactly Lizzie's biggest fan.
But Connor surprises her. Not only is he a great tutor, but he’s also a pretty great babysitter. And chauffeur. And listener. And he understands exactly what it’s like to be on your own before you're ready. Before long, Lizzie realizes having a responsible-adult type around has its perks... and that she'd like to do some rather irresponsible (but considerably adult) things with him as well. Good thing he's not the kind of guy who'd ever reciprocate.
Until he does.
Until they turn into far more than teacher and student.
Until the relationship that helped put their lives back together threatens everything they both have left.
Disclaimer: Dahlia and I are Twitter mutuals and she occasionally indulges my Camille Johannssen headcanons. I am, however, honesty personified.
MY THOUGHTS
First of all, this book is hot as fuck and I had to pause and take care of myself a few times. I’d apologise for the TMI but if you can’t handle that, this book might not be for you anyway. Now, I know the FUCK NA crowd might still not be terribly impressed with that, but there’s so much good, well-developed story here that it can’t be written off as purely “drama with sex”. Do I have your attention now? Good. Because this book was so good that after I finished it, I was in such an excellent mood and felt like reading all the things, and it didn’t hit me until several hours later that what I really wanted was to have the next book in this series already.
It helped that I took an immediate liking to the voice. It’s blunt, coarse, and honest, and never in a way that felt forced. Lizzie has — what are to me — such natural reactions to things. This is a girl who will get annoyed and start cursing before realising yelling everything out the minute it pops into your head, or, you know, emailing your TA that he’s an asshole, might not be the most diplomatic way to go about things. It’s not unlikely for her first reaction to be “shit” / “fucking hell” / “what the actual fuck” and you have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to read about a heroine like that. I both related and cracked the hell up every time she was confronted with life. Plus, she’s Filipina-American and not super skinny, so there are just many things I love about her.
I pretty much mind-melded with her. After a while, “what the hell are you doing here, Connor” and “oh shut the fuck up, Sophie” genuinely became my thoughts. There’s also this one altercation between Lizzie and Sophie where I almost peed my pants. I know I probably should have been a Cait in this scenario, but I was a total Frankie and legit ended up cackling my way through it. SPEAKING OF. I love the Lizzie – Cait – Frankie triumvirate deeply — they COULD run an empire together okay, the term is totally appropriate — and it makes me ridiculously happy that their friendship is what ties this series together. You know those relationships where you can tell by the way people act around/react to the other just how attuned they are to each other? Theirs is 100% a friendship like that and it kills me. They’re an epic trio and I wish we could have seen more of them in this book.
I also completely insta-loved on Frankie. I don’t even know how it happened, just that it did and that I haven’t regretted it since. I vaguely remember referring to her as my pansexual goddess somewhere and I still stand by that.
My one problem is that I didn’t feel enough connection to the initial conflict. I think it would have helped if we could have seen Lizzie’s parents before they died, because I would have been more attached to them. The thing is, this would be my exact situation if my parents died. I’d also be the one who’d have to take care of her siblings. So while I could theoretically put myself in Lizzie’s place and imagine how I’d feel if my parents suddenly died, I prefer not to do that. That being said, I think this is a consequence of the focus being on how Lizzie deals with everything that’s suddenly being thrown her way, which is the part that I hardcore loved. Adler excels at writing very nuanced feelings and characters. I love that she showed how messy things get at times and how there are totally days when everything seems to be going wrong. It’s the kind of story I live for and really want to see more of in the NA category, because welcome to the life of the average supposed-to-be-adult.
One masterful example of just how intricately Adler describes emotion is when [View post to see spoiler] Okay, that was evil but it involves a genuine plot spoiler. Just know that the ending is very realistic and more of a Happy For Now than a full HEA, which is something I always appreciate. I mean, I really, really, really wanted everything to work out because I get naïvely hopeful like that, especially when family dynamics are involved, but I love that it didn’t all fall neatly into place. And while I might not have felt the full extent of Lizzie’s loss because of the depicted time frame, the moments when she breaks down in the middle of the night/has to pack up her parents’ clothes/mentally slaps herself for not making it a point to learn Tagalog when her mother was still alive were terrible for me too.
So now that I’ve talked about everything else that makes this book great, let’s get back to my original point. It feels super sappy putting it like this, but while there was a LOT of (very, very good) sex, it felt like every one of these scenes added something to the story, which I’m always a fan of. Maybe it’s just me but they never felt like filler porn. Or maybe the variety of positions scenes distracted me. I don’t know, but it WORKED. (And I still stand by my original it-added-to-the-story point. I just wanted to create a distraction from the potential mush.) Lizzie and Connor also felt so real that I mostly saw them as characters and rarely thought of them as the student and her TA. The few times I did see them that way though, it started to squick me out a little, as did the age difference every now and then. [View post to see spoiler] Connor occasionally got on my nerves. It’s not even my intention to be super harsh on him, because he’s fine really, but he also seemed to be showing up EVERYWHERE. Just for once I wanted Lizzie to have a night off and to see her having fun by herself, with the assistance of Cait and Frankie, of course.
And this is my slightly all-over-the-place list of reasons as to why I think it’s very appropriate that this series was named RADleigh University. (This is a terrible pun that I have now made twice but I had to.) (Just like you have to read this book immediately.)
MEMORABLE QUOTES
“You’re incorrigible,” Connor informs me, sitting back on his heels. Judging by the size of the hard-on threatening to bust through his khakis, he’s not particularly mad.
“Use words like that and I might not return the favor,” I say with a nod toward his groin.
He rolls his eyes and untucks his shirt to cover it. “You’re not returning any ‘favors’ tonight, Elizabeth. I should go, and so should you.”
I sigh. “We’re back to ‘Elizabeth’ now?”
“I like the name Elizabeth,” Connor informs me. “Multiple queens. Elizabeth Bennet. It’s a good name.”
“I hate Jane Austen.”
“Of course you do.” He says it as if I’m utterly absurd.
I’M SORRY apparently I burned through this book so quickly that I forgot to highlight anything? But I remembered Lizzie being in my anti-JA club — I love her so much — and wanted to immortalise that.