ARC Review – Make Me Want by Rebecca Brooks

Make Me Want is a contemporary romance set in northern Washington in a mountain community, and is the third in a romance series. Full disclosure – I haven’t read the first two in the series, and they weren’t necessary to enjoy the story. This was so fun, and I finished the whole book in less than 8 hours of not-completely-consistent reading. Let’s get right into it, because I really enjoyed this book.

Make Me Want opens with Tyler McCall driving to Gold Mountain, Washington from LA, where his best friend and fellow firefighter recently died in a forest fire. Tyler blames himself, and is pretty broken up about it, and just wants to get this job of building a firebreak around the town done with so he can get a desk job and brood for the rest of his life. But then he spots Abbi Haas in a bar on his first night, and he pretends to be her boyfriend to “save her” from goon Russ Young. They go to the Nature Center, where Abbi works as a naturalist, and they have glorious sexy times in a field before discovering that they are on opposite sides of the firebreak issue. But… everyone in town thinks they’re dating. So they keep up the charade. And then all of a sudden – it’s not much of a charade anymore.

3 Things I Loved

1. Tyler. I could take or leave Abbi, but I LOVED Tyler. He was a very realistic love interest, someone with some skeletons in his closet but not enough to keep him from being a normal human, and not so many that he turns into an abusive monster. He’s a great romantic character, and sexy as hell.
2. Abbi’s friends. Abbi’s friends were so great. I know that two of them have their own books (Mack and Sam) and that Claire is going to be the subject of the last book in the series, and they are the primary reasons why I want to read the rest of the books. They just didn’t put up with Abbi’s shit, and I was happy for that. Because she was kind of full of shit a lot of the time.
3. The realistic brokenness of both of their pasts. People have histories, and those histories sometimes suck. This wasn’t so messed up that it wasn’t real, but it was messed up enough to affect how they love and relate to people in their adult lives. It was a perfect balance.

Anything Problematic

There were a lot of things that I found squicky that weren’t necessarily problematic. For example, Abbi has some stuff in her past (I’m trying not to spoil too much) that make it very difficult for her to believe that some people are genuinely nice humans, who don’t expect things in return. And Tyler has some stuff in his past that makes him want to save everyone at the risk of losing himself. Together, those don’t particularly mix well, which is the prime conflict in the book, but what I found particularly squicky was that Abbi continually said that she “owed” Tyler when he would step in to protect her from a potentially abusive ex. I didn’t like that. It makes sense for her character, once you know the whole story. But I really didn’t like reading it.

Rating

A reminder of the rating scale:

• Red = DNF, I hated everything
• Orange = Ugh, no thank you
• Yellow = I mean, I’ve read worse, but there were problems
• Green = This was good, but not something I’d reread
• Blue = Oh my gosh, everyone should be reading this book
• Purple = This is the unicorn of books and I will be rereading it until the binding falls apart

I was expecting to find this story boring and predictable – oh, a random fireman comes to town? Sure, sure. But it wasn’t like that at all. I genuinely enjoyed this book, and if the Goodreads reviews are any indication, I think I’d like the others in the series even more. I even purchased them already! With all of that being said, I’m going to give Make Me Want a GREENISH-BLUE rating. I don’t necessarily think this book is for everyone, but I enjoyed it and will be reading the rest of the series, for sure.

Thank you to Entangled Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. This has no bearing on my review. A special thank you to Entangled for approving me for their review list, because it’s been super fun so far. I look forward to more books!

Happy reading!

-A.