This was an ARC I won from the author in a Facebook contest (!) I know, right? My opinions are my own.
Gretchen Miller is a self-proclaimed badass, and she’s not lying. After growing up with financial instability, food insecurities and a lot of general uncertainness due to her father’s unpredictability, she became determined never to have to depend on anyone ever again and started earning and saving her own money as a teenager, squirrelling it away for a future project. That project became a dance studio for kids, known as “Miss Miller’s from Minnetonka”. Recently, about to turn 40, she’s decided to “expand her empire”, and is in the process of buying a second building, intending to expand to yoga and pilates classes. She has also decided that she is DONE with men, after years of disappointing deadbeat boyfriends and terrible Tinder dates.
Gretchen doesn’t really have time to take a whole month off from expanding her business, but to help out a friend of a friend, she agrees to mentor kids at a summer camp in the woods. Being away from civilisation and with limited cell service will hopefully help with her “man cleanse” and further her ambitions of “becoming a crone”.
Tennyson “Teddy” Knight agreed to take a job at the same summer camp without even realising it was going to involve teenagers (he didn’t read the fine print). He just needed to get away after the dramatic breakup of his band, where he became tabloid fodder after trashing a hotel room. Teddy’s not really an outdoorsy person, doesn’t know anything about how to relate to teenagers and is generally a grumpy misanthrope. However, time away from tabloid attention and the opportunity to work on a revenge album sounds good to him.
To begin with, Gretchen pegs Teddy as an entitled asshole because he mistook her for an overenthusiastic fan when they first met and did not behave graciously, while Teddy finds Gretchen annoying and far too perky. Her worldview seems to be the exact opposite of his. With cabins right next to each other in the woods, and a lot of time on their hands, they develop a tentative friendship as the days go by, and discover that they have a lot more in common than they would have imagined at first. Taking on board the idea of temporary camp friendships, they seem able to be open to one another about a lot of stuff they’ve never really told anyone else about.
All the talking furthers the mutual attraction between them, and after about twelve hours lost in the woods together, Gretchen decides to ask Teddy to be her “last hurrah”, one last fling before she embraces her crone status and gives up men and dating forever. Since they agree that it’s purely physical and has a set end date when Gretchen leaves the camp, neither of them has hangups about a lot of the stuff that’s complicated dating for them in the past. Of course, when it’s time for Gretchen to actually leave and return to her real life, it turns out that neither of them are happy with the never seeing each other again plan.
Full review on my blog.