Kissing Tolstoy was awful and silly. I loathed its puerile story and nonsensical plotting, so, Penny Reid: YOU WIN! I am giving up on anything your name is on except MAYBE a Winston Brothers book, and even then it had better not cost me any money. Again and again her books with younger leads have problematic elements, and while it is classified as a “new adult” romance, only one character in Kissing Tolstoy is actually a recent grown up. The heroine, Anna, is a university student and the hero is her professor. I’ll let Amazon do some of the heavy lifting:
What do you do when you discover that your super-hot blind date from months ago is now your super-hot Russian Lit professor?
You overthink everything and pray for a swift end to your misery, of course!
So does the reader.
Goodness, even the blurb for this book let me down. So here I go:
There’s a young woman who accidentally texts and then meets the wrong guy at a bar. He’s a really hot biker dude, so she freaks out because she thinks she’s not in his league. She goes back to school to take a Russian Literature course that has been, thus far, very hard to register for because the professor is just that attractive. He’s also the sexy motorcyclist from the bar. As a bonus he’s an actual Russian who specializes in the woman’s favourite author and hails from an extremely wealthy family. I can’t remember if he’s displaced royalty, but that’s the only dream-hero-fantasy-romance-guy box he doesn’t tick.
The young woman and the professor spar in class and have the hots for each other. She tries to quit the class owing to said hots, he prevents it — showing a true lack of narrative sense — and they get together just as the book ends and sets the scene for the next installment.
With being her teacher, there are ethical implications that must be addressed in some way and aren’t. Logically, she should quit the class and therefore no longer be his student. She doesn’t even need the credit for her major, but she stays in the class. It blows up and, the next thing you know, they are Fighting for Their Love when there are simple, straightforward answers to all of their problems. It was really annoying.
A sample of the writing:
“She smells like wildflowers and quiet libraries, redolent of peace and exuberance.” I looked to my sister and found her expression sober.
“Dad wouldn’t like that.”
“No. I don’t imagine he and Anna would get along at all.” I smirked at the thought. She was far too independent, of both mind and spirit.
I tried to find a gif of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot saying, “Nobody talks like that!”, but was unsuccessful.
I’ve created a summary of Penny Reid’s books. If you decide to take a chance, I strongly advise that you use it to make a selection. Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful or my streamlined recommendations list.
Reviewer’s Note: The Amazon link will take you to a book worth reading, The Hating Game by Sally Thorne. I disliked Kissing Tolstoy to much to even link to it.
Reid was releasing individual chapters of this last year with her newsletter and I rage quit it. Before release. From a free newsletter!
A) Anna is annoying. I’m so very tired of Reid’s awkward twee heroines who spout pop culture references. It’s not cute. It’s bordering on infantilizing.
B) The fact that, for all that overthinking Anna was doing, not once was she thinking, “Oh, geez… maybe boning the professor isn’t a great idea, and aren’t there POLICIES AGAINST THIS KIND OF THING”. Not once. (It may come up later in the story but I had already quit at that point.)
When Reid is right, her books are really fun. But so often it’s just an exercise in WTF.
*ahem* Sorry to rant on your review.
Since I have said out loud, “she needs to be punched in the head,” while reading a Reid book, you can safely assume that we are on the same page.