I am on a blogging roll, playing catch up over my 3 days of no teaching and no marking, before assessments come in at the end of the week. I feel astounded at the free time. But also astounded that I am writing rather than reading. Let’s relish the moment and here is the May TBR Challenge topic of New Beginnings – here’s an international student love story.

Elle Kennedy’s Girl Abroad

When nineteen-year-old Abbey Bly gets the opportunity to study abroad for a year in London, it’s the perfect chance to finally slip out from under the thumb of her beloved but overbearing retired rock star father. She’s ready to be free, to discover herself – but first off, to meet the girls she’s rooming with. That is, until she arrives at her gorgeous new flat to discover those roommates are actually all boys. Charming, funny, insufferably attractive boys. And off-limits, with a rule against fraternizing between housemates after unwanted drama with the previous girl.

Abbey has never considered herself a rulebreaker. But soon, she’s lying to her father about her living situation and falling for not one, but two men she can’t have: her rugby-player roommate and a broody musician with a girlfriend. Not to mention, her research for school has gotten her tangled in a deeply hidden scandal of a high nobility family, surrounding her in secrets on all sides.

If there’s any hope of Abbey finding love, answers, or a future in London, she’ll have to decide which rules – and hearts – might be worth breaking . . .

I think if I was anywhere near being a teen/young adult, I would have enjoyed this study abroad, coming of age, love triangle, finding yourself away from your parents story. However, I am in my fifties and I just got increasingly annoyed as I read this book. I was especially agitated with the stereotyped characters – the American ingenue, Abbey and her accidentally rooming with 3 men in a share house in Notting Hill :: rolls eyes:: – the Black, gay Brit, the Hugh Grant Brit, the jacked laconic Australian.

Then you have the protective retired rockstar dad who is struggling with separation anxiety and not being close to his teenage daughter and seriously, I don’t blame the man. Abbey was way too young to be organising this trip into the foreign unknown on her own. Then add all her lies and manipulations so her father doesn’t realise that she wasn’t in a women’s dorm but with unknown men. This could have gone scarily wrong had it been a different genre, and it was all just too much for old-parent-me. I did giggle when Abbey considers buying her father an “emotional support rabbit” to get him through her year abroad.

There were a whole lot of tertiary characters who were also just too typical – the drugged up minor royal, the studious girl friend, the enabling USian friend – because you gotta have some chicks in the story. There was also the unfortunate choice of the fictional university called “Pembridge” – a stylised Posh+Cambridge which rhymed too much with an actual gaol in Victoria, Australia called Pentridge.

Then there was the subplot to fill in the spaces in the which-love-do-I-choose . A university ancestry/heritage/lords and earls gone missing genealogy project which culminated with Abbey’s cringe advice to get DNA tested which bored me a tad. How is that a top end, innovative university student outcome? I gave her a high end Pass and wished she had paid more attention to her classes (note that I shouldn’t be grading characters but I teach undergrads and I couldn’t help myself. I definitely need to escape them when I am reading fiction).

There is also the key love triangle of do-I -love Jack the laconic Australian or Nate the British bassist who plays at the local ye-olde English pub vibe. No. I am too old for this and I can’t remember who she chose and I have very little energy to try to find out. I obviously vagued out on this detail. They were both same-same. Ultimately, a peripheral young man in Abbey’s life, a Happy For Now.

All my grumpy commentary aside, I know that I probably would have lapped up this story if I was reading it at as a 16 year old. It all just made me sigh and skim read. So why did I read to the end? I liked the cover of the book (LOL) and the writing style sparkled. For example

I wake to the sounds of passing cars outside my window, of bicycles and people walking their dogs. The aural intonations of a community rousing itself to meet the day, something I haven’t experienced with regularity in years.

This level of writing is sustained throughout the book, so though the plot was way too out of my interest, the writing style kept me reading.

Metadata:

My metadata: accidental roommate, adventure, ancestry, celebrity, contemporary, dads, growing up, love triangle, romance, so wise for her age such insight, stereotypes, veddy English, Young Adult.

My local library’s metadata: Man-woman relationships — Fiction, College students — Fiction, Foreign study — Fiction, Roommates — Fiction, Rock musicians — Fiction, Scandals — Fiction, Fathers and daughters — Fiction, Triangles (Interpersonal relations) — Fiction, London (England) — Fiction, Romance fiction, Campus fiction.

This metadata record is rather rich and useful. There is a lack of genre for Young Adult fiction – it is a stretch to think that college students would cover this as the genre is the more searchable tag. The loathsome Man-woman relationships rears its ugly head. But the subject record is better than most that I have outlined in my posts.