Hello friends, happy Wednesday, I hope you’re all doing well! Today I’m going to be posting my review of Cale Dietrich’s novel The Love Interest.

The Love Interest by: Cale Dietrich: All his life, Caden has been trained to become a Nice; the perfect boy. Meanwhile, Dylan has been trained to be a Bad; the ultimate bad boy. They have been trained by a secret organization called Love Interest, a company that sets people of great interest together to obtain the world’s largest secrets. Caden and Dylan have been set out to win over the same girl, Juliet. One will win, the other will die trying – that’s the script, but no one expected to go off script, until now. The whole concept for this novel was super strange and the reader wasn’t totally feeling it. It did have its intriguing moments, but for the most part, the whole cultivating and assigning people to fight to the death for not true love, but for deadly secrets felt so ruthless. There were also moments where the plot was extremely cringe-worthy and it was hard to read. The world also didn’t feel built up enough; we’re not given enough to believe everything that this story was selling. There were a few things that didn’t sit well with the reader; the body shamming and the obsession with being attractive and hot was a complete turn off. The writing felt icky with all the focus on body image being strongly in the negative, where each of the characters had to look muscular all the time, told they have to dress “sexy” or look “hot” as well as always talking about food in relation to weight gain. There was even a part where it was joked that the lead teen girl character looked pregnant after eating. The lgbt rep felt like could have been better; it was good to see a gay main character take the lead, but his whole side plot about realizing his feelings for another man just didn’t feel like it was handled with the care it deserved. It didn’t help that this wasn’t as fast paced as the reader wanted; sure the timeline for the plot jumped quite a bit, but the plot dragged on as we neared the end. The reader would be lying if they said they weren’t curious how it was all going to end, but once it’s found out what they plan to do, it kinda got predictable as to how it would end. It again, didn’t feel believable how it ended, five teens against a large secret organization, where’s the logic? The characters felt boring; they were so one dimensional that we were literally told one thing about them and that was their personality. It didn’t make the reader feel invested enough to connect with them or want to read about them. In the end, this story had potential, but it just lacked in quality.