Welcome to our stop on Mia and the Bad Boy's review tour hosted by Good Choice Reading Promotions. You can follow the tour HERE.
Author: Lisa Burstein
Publisher: Entangled Crush
Source: NetGalley/Publisher
Release Date: May 19th, 2015
Pages: 220
Format: eARC
Age Group: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary Romance
This good girl’s about to meet her match…Ryder Brooks is living the dream—he’s famous, loved by millions of girls, and miserable. All he really wants is to write his own music, not Seconds to Juliet’s sugary sweet pop. In order to do that, though, the “bad boy” of the band will have to play by the rules. And that includes behaving with his new—and super cute—über-good-girl tutor.Mia Reyes is in fangirl heaven. Tutoring her favorite member of her favorite band? It’s a dream come true…until it turns into a complete nightmare. Ryder is nothing like she thought. He’s crude, arrogant, and pretty much a total jerk. And the worst part? She’s roped into pretending to be his girlfriend so that no one finds out he’s being tutored. Fake kisses, plenty of PDA, and even sharing his hotel room…But sometimes even the baddest of bad boys needs a little redemption.
Sweet. Adorable. Precious. Lovely. Happy. All words that describe this book. It was just so pleasant to read! And the love story...so sweet. I mean seriously sweet with a cherry on top.
Mia and the Bad Boy is written in the third person and told from both Ryder’s and Mia’s POVs. I love when stories are told through multiple viewpoints, because it allows me to get into the headspace of each of the characters. Truthfully, I am typically not a huge fan of reading books written in the third person. Also, I have never read an ebook before, which is the format that I received this book in. However, despite these two things, this book totally kept my attention. I wanted to keep reading. I wanted to find out what was going to happen, how the story was going to play out.
What really stood out about this book, for me, was that our main character, Mia, is Mexican American. It is not often that female leads in Young Adult (YA) books are from a non caucasian background. I also really loved that Mia is a very intelligent young woman who is intent on becoming the first in her family to attend college/university. Though this may not be her dream, she knows how important it is to her family, and so is always the “good girl” she has been raised to be.
I felt that Lisa Burstein did a great job of accurately portraying the dynamics within a Hispanic household in regards to how children are raised and the educational expectations placed upon them. Being of Hispanic background myself, I was able to 100% relate to the way that Mia was raised in a household where getting a good education and going to college were the most important things. Hanging out and having a boyfriend were just not permitted.
Ryder is a bad boy with a tender heart. He has been hurt and let down and betrayed so many times in his past, he has become jaded. He doesn’t trust anyone and always has his guard up, and he has secrets that he doesn't want anyone to find out about. Secrets that he feels could destroy him and his career. Though several aspects of Ryder’s character are very cookie cutter and very predictable, his secret motivation for his future was most certainly not expected, and I really appreciated that. It really gave him more depth, rather than just being a “bad boy”.
Mia is the “good girl”. Always doing the right things, always making the right decisions. She sees working for Ryder as a means to an end, as the opportunity she needs to earn money to pay for college. Mia is strong minded and stands up for herself and doesn't take any crap from Ryder, right from the beginning. She knows what she has to do for her future, and won’t let anyone stand in her way. However, Mia has a secret of her own, a hidden talent, one that could change the course of her perfectly planned out future.
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Lisa Burstein is a tea seller by day and a writer by night. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University and is glad to finally have it be worth more than the paper it was printed on. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her very patient husband, a neurotic dog and two cats.She wrote her first story when she was in second grade. It was a Thanksgiving tale from the point of view of the turkey from freezer to oven to plate. It was scandalous.
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I like the bad boy, good girl theme. Also glad to see there is some diversity. Thank you for the great review. I will have to check out the first in this series. This is a new author to me.
ReplyDeleteThank you! This was a new author for me too! I'm glad I gave it a go!
DeleteLove a bad boy rock star!! Sounds like a really great series, I'll definitely be checking this one out and book 1 as well. Thanks for sharing :)
ReplyDeleteThanks! I hope you enjoy it!
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