Review: The Dare

The Dare by Elle Kennedy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Taylor is a curvacious, big-busted shy virgun. Her sorority continues the outdated practice of hazing new sisters and playing a charming game they call Dare or Dare. After a dare went horribly wrong and Taylor kissed a random guy who turned out to be another sister's boyfriend, Taylor has been the butt of several spiteful dares, the latest being to take one of the hottest hockey players, Conor Edwards, upstairs at the latest Greek Row party.

Conor is a recent transferee to Briar University. Originally a dirt-poor son of a working mom their lives changed forever when his mom fell in love and married a billionaire. Conor was well on his way to a life of drugs, gangs and petty crime until he was sent to Briar and he feels a complete fraud, as if people would look at him in disgust if they knew who he really was. After twelve months of taking advantage of being a young good looking hockey player and hooking up with loads of girls Conor is starting to feel like he wants something more, a connection, someone who actually sees him. Then a scared looking girl with beautiful eyes asks him to humour her and come upstairs for a bet - she emphasises that she has no designs on his body!

What follows is a classic fake romance becomes real but Conor has this low self-esteem, accentuated by the fact that he doesn't know what he wants to do in life (other than follow his step-father into his business), and Taylor worries that the romance is all an elaborate hoax and Conor will dump her in the most humiliating way possible.

I love Elle Kennedy and I have loved the Briar U series but I have to say this just seemed to be recycling old plot lines and three-quarters of the way through this book I just thought, 'meh! Read this all before in one of the earlier books' First Conor has a situation and pushes Taylor away, that gets resolved, and then Taylor has a situation and pushes Conor away, yawn.

Maybe my expectations were too high, if this was a book from an unknown author I would have rated this higher, because Elle Kennedy's writing is good, but this just lacked any originality for me - a sad way to end a series.

View all my reviews