Lynn Painter's FIRST AND FOREVER

Thanks to partners NetGalley and Berkley Publishing for the digital ARC of Lynn Painter's First and Forever. The book will be published on May 12! 

While I haven’t read all of Lynn Painter’s books, her work has been reliably excellent for me. I primarily think of her as a YA romance author, but First and Forever is the second of her adult romances that I’ve read and enjoyed.

The characters here are the novel’s biggest strength: they’re quirky and sweet, and I love the way Painter weaves in some fabulous secondary characters. In First and Forever, Duffy Distefano begins the book as a target because of a very public, very negative interaction with the mascot of the Minneapolis Coyote football team. In a desperate attempt to quell the trolling, Duffy’s dad Tony sets up an interview for Duffy on the local tv station; unbeknownst to her, Connor Cunningham, the Coyotes’ tight end, joins her for the segment.

Their hilarious banter and obvious chemistry is a hit, which helps both Duffy and the Coyotes, and the PR team asks Connor to go out with Duffy again. He reluctantly agrees, and finds that their chemistry is even better than he’d thought. For Duffy, the prospect of dating someone famous isn’t appealing at all . . . but the joy this relationship brings her dad, who is in poor health and also grieving Duffy’s mom, inspires her own, more transparent fake dating proposition to Connor.

The prospect of just when and how Connor’s deception will arise hovers in the background throughout the book, and that relationship-built-on-a-lie is almost always a negative for me. Fortunately, Painter’s writing—the cleverness of the banter, the quirkiness of the characters—helped me to (mostly) set aside my qualms. First and Forever isn’t quite as strong as Painter’s other books for me, but I still recommend it. ​

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