Just for Now is a YA novel with some exalted exclamation-point-laden reviews on Goodreads, and contains very adult themes. It's on sale for $1.99.
The day Preston Drake figured out that wealthy women paid well for a set of tight abs and a pretty face his life turned around. The run down rat-infested trailer he had shared with his alcoholic mother and three younger siblings was now only a place he visited to pay the bills and stock the pantry with food. He no longer worried about his family starving or living without electricity. The money he made entertaining rich older women more than covered his family’s needs and his own.
He had it all figured out. Except… There was this girl.
She was as innocent as he was tainted.
Amanda Hardy wished her knees didn’t get weak when Preston walked into a room. She hated the fact her heart raced when he flashed his smile in her direction. He had a different girl in his bed every night. He was the kind of boy a smart girl ran from. So, why was she coming up with ways to get close to him? Even when it was obvious he wanted to keep her at a distance.
Maybe her heart knew something the world didn’t. Maybe Preston Drake was more than just a pretty face.
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Dangerous Flirtation was originally published in 1995 by Silhouette. This new digital edition is .99c. (I love the older cover, and the large print cover, too. Isn't that the dude from Seventh Heaven?
“First impressions are sometimes misleading. Not everyone is precisely what he seems to be.”
Rosalind thought she had her life all mapped out — a job she loved, a thoughtful, reliable fiance … what more could she want?
How was she to know that a handsome stranger with laughing blue eyes and a roguish grin would burst into her life, kiss her to distraction and turn her world upside down?
But Jack Drayton was an enigma: there was clearly more to him than met the eye. He offered romance, excitement, passion — and challenged Rosalind to accept. Dared she?
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Forgive my Fins is a YA romance and is the first book in Childs' Fins series, which focuses on mermaids. (Obviously.) It's on sale for $1.99.
Lily Sanderson has a secret, and it’s not that she has a huge crush on gorgeous swimming god Brody Bennett, who makes her heart beat flipper-fast. Unrequited love is hard enough when you’re a normal teenage girl, but when you’re half human, half mermaid like Lily, there’s no such thing as a simple crush.
Lily’s mermaid identity is a secret that can’t get out, since she’s not just any mermaid – she’s a Thalassinian princess. When Lily found out three years ago that her mother was actually a human, she finally realized why she didn’t feel quite at home in Thalassinia, and she’s been living on land and going to Seaview high school ever since, hoping to find where she truly belongs.
Sure, land has its problems – like her obnoxious, biker boy neighbor Quince Fletcher – but it has that one major perk – Brody. The problem is, mermaids aren’t really the casual dating type – when they “bond,” it’s for life. When Lily’s attempt to win Brody’s love leads to a tsunami-sized case of mistaken identity, she is in for a tidal wave of relationship drama, and she finds out, quick as a tailfin flick, that happily-ever-after never sails quite as smoothly as you planned.
So Abbi Glines is happy to sell her work as YA when it’ll get her more sales, even though it’s pretty explicitly adult by what the reviews say? See, this is one of many many reasons I dislike NA (or at least what NA is right now). It’s not “mature stories” about growing up – it’s college age romance & erotica. Meh, I have no idea why I’m complaining: Abbi Glines’s work is an instant No for me. So sick of instant alpha-douche lust/love & angst.
Glines isn’t necessarily the one “selling” it as YA – it’s part a series published by Simon & Schuster, and they may have as much to do with the YA designation, if not more.
Given the description, though, the Glines book would be something I’d describe as NA not YA.
*gasp* Sarah, is that eyeglasses I spy on the heroine on the old skool Dangerous Flirtation cover?!
Bought the mermaid book for my “daughter.”
A YA novel about a gigolo? Yeah, that raised a few eyebrows here. The question for me is, despite the YA designation, who is actually buying these? Is it really pre-teen girls who are getting the wrong message about the good girl falling for the bad boy and what healty relationships are about? Do they even get that much out of it? Is it 30-somethings like me who roll their eyes but eat up the angsty candy anyway? Heck, I’d probably be ok with it if it’s 16 year olds reading it. I read some pretty damaged and raunchy stuff at 16, most of it masquerading as science fiction and fantasy. Unfortunately, I don’t know any 13 year old girls who can tell me what they’re reading and how they feel about it, or if they’ve ever heard of Abbi Glines.
WARNING: CRANKY OLD LADY GIT-OFFA-MY-LAWN THREAD-DERAILING KVETCHING AHEAD
I actually haven’t spent much time reading GR reviews, but reading the linked, umm… reactions to the Abbi Glines title suddenly made me feel a whoooole lot better about the Amazon takeover. I dearly hope that those aren’t typical of the site, but that inane unhelpful fangirl squeefest made me yearn for good ol’ Harriet Klausner. /crankfest
I adore that Silhouette cover. And I’m a sucker for the matching eye-shadow and lipstick on all the Childs’s FINS covers.
I still have trouble thinking of NA as an actual thing. To me, it all sounds like YA contemporaries aimed at the older ending of the YA-reading audience (i.e. older teens and adults).
On a related note: Does anyone have a NA book they’d recommend that is NOT a contemporary? Like, a NA fantasy, or paranormal? I keep thinking I should at least *try* a NA book, to see why people keep insisting that it’s different from YA. However, YA contemporaries for the most part do nothing for me, and, like I said, all the NA books I’ve heard about sound like YA contemporaries.
Whoah, what’s NA? This is the first I’ve heard of it.
Haha, totally agree with Hapax about relative strengths & weaknesses of Goodreads v. Amazon reviews. Goodreads is absolutely fan-ruled, and the reviews can range from rants to ridiculous photo montages. But on the flip side, Amazon reviews are often too corporate, and I can rarely trust that the “top” reviewers don’t get their own ARCs or some other benefit. (The fact that Harriet Klausner’s reviews are overwhelmingly 4 to 5 stars always seemed pretty fishy to me).
Maybe we’ll see a happier medium evolve?
For the record, and I’m not sure if anyone will see this since this is yesterday’s post, I decided against Just for Now, but did buy Abbi Glines’ “Fallen Too Far”, cause it was only $1 at Kobo, but that’s because it turned out to be a cliffhanger to which, fortunately, the sequel was published a couple weeks ago (hence the sale on the first one…I see what they did there). So then I bought the sequel and…yeah….I may have read them both in the last 24 hours. And that’s even though I did spend 9 hours at work today. It was the worst sort of literary crack, but it was literary crack on a freight train.
Be ye warned.