“You don’t have to take care of me.”
“Yeah, I do. We have a mild truce now, remember?”
Genre: Romance
Actual Rating: 4 stars
Spicy Meter: 3 fire emojis
Content Warnings: As given by the author—Fatphobia both in flashback and in present day, fatshaming from a family member, and deals with death and loss.
“The Make-Up Test” follows Allison Avery and Colin Benjamin, two grad students with the same advisor. Sounds simple enough, right? Except it isn’t. Allison and Colin dated while they were in undergrad and it did not end well, to say the least. Now, years later, and in a more competitive program, they’re left to work together to the best of their abilities. That is, until their advisor tells them she’ll only be able to keep one grad student moving forward. Now, with higher stakes, they end up in the exact same situation they were years ago. Will history rewrite itself? Or will old habits prevail?
You see that endorsement on the cover? Well, I agree wholeheartedly with Ali Hazelwood: I’ll read anything Jenny Howe writes. Her narrative is clever and her (most of her) characters complex and layered. This book had a second-chance romance and lovers-to-enemies-to-friends-to-lovers trope. It’s told partially through flashbacks, which were nice and helped us understand why the main characters act the way they do.
I loved Allison and how she was protrayed as more than just a student. I, myself, am currently in grad school and something I feel like my whole life revolves around that—but Allison’s doesn’t. We get to see her shifting relationships with old friends and how her family dynamics, all but ideal, affect her, but she pushes on.
And then there is Colin. Bland, one-dimentional Colin. Now, I really did feel like he was only there to fill up that romantic void in Allison’s life. Like he had no other purpose than that. We do get a sob story about his family background, but it doesn’t really seem to phase him or define him in any way. He’s just an insecure, white man hoping to thrive in academics. That’s it.
But the story was entretaining and relatively fast-paced. I think it was definitely worth the read. My only complaint is that it wasn’t as spicy as I thought it would be. The sexual tension was there, but the scenes didn’t deliver. I felt like it was missing something. I wasn’t ready to let go of these characters.
I would highly recommend this book, I can’t believe it’s a debut novel. If you like second-chance romance and enemies-to-lovers, “The Make-Up Test” is for you.
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ARC provided by NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.
Publication Date: September 13, 2022
“You don’t like happy endings?”
(…) “I think the problem is more that I like them too much. No one gets that in real life.”
andrea's galley 