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Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Theme: Age Difference, Forced Proximity, Off Limits Sibling or Friend
Archetype: STEM
Problematic Summer Romance is a friends-to-lovers romance/brother’s best friend romance, but it utilizes those tropes without any masculine over-protectiveness, which I appreciated. It’s also a romance that’s light on external conflict, but heavy on emotional growth, which was perfect for me.
Maya Killgore’s parents died when she was barely a teenager, leaving her to be raised by her overwhelmed brother (about fifteen years her senior). Said brother has an extremely lucrative biotech start up with his two friends. When Maya is away at college she has a bad breakup and calls her brother only to connect to one of his friend/partners Conor Harkness. Conor is nearby and comes to Maya’s emotional aid and it starts a friendship between the two that will last for three years.
This friendship involves emotionally vulnerable phone conversations into the wee hours of the night and some form of digital communication every single day. Then when Maya confronts Conor with the fact that she’s falling for him, he cuts contact completely citing their age difference (again about fifteen years) and the power dynamic as being too problematic for them to have a romantic relationship or even continue their friendship.
When the book opens, Maya’s brother is getting married in Sicily and she and Connor will both be attending the wedding, putting them in close proximity for a week. Maya is still in love with Conor and determined to make him see that a relationship with her could work.
First of all, I really liked how the book handled the age gap and the brother’s best friend trope. A lot of books would have the conflict surrounding the brother being over-protective and their relationship being forbidden. That never made sense to me since it implies the brother can’t trust the best friend (in which case why are you friends?) It also infantilizes the sister.
The fact that everyone here is treated as an adult with agency was really refreshing.
There’s not a lot of external conflict, but there is angst. All of the angst belongs to Conor. He grew up with a shitty, wealthy father who treated relationships like transactions. Said father also had a second marriage to a woman younger than his own children.
Conor feels like he’ll be following his father’s footsteps by dating a younger woman, and since his father taught him that all relationships are about power and money, he considers the fact that he’s wealthy to mean that he’s also in a more powerful, and therefore predatory position. (FWIW Maya’s brother is also wealthy and she has access to his money so that’s a moot point).
The book is condensed to the week of the wedding, plus some flashbacks.
I think a week is a short enough time span that Conor’s emotional journey makes sense. Had this book spanned years it would have felt like he couldn’t get over himself, but the shorter timespan made it work.
Connor’s emotional journey felt genuine–he’s got a lot of shitty family stuff to unpack. It wasn’t just a “I’m a bad guy and I’m bad for you.” He had real work to do.
It would have been nice for Maya to have a little more growth versus just waiting for Connor to pull his head out of his butt.
…but honestly I’m in a mental place where I don’t need a ton of conflict right now. There are also some wedding shenanigans to lighten up the book since Conor’s navel gazing can get kinda dark, so that helped level out the narrative.
Problematic Summer Romance takes some fun romance tropes but presents them without toxicity, treating its main characters like adults who can make their own decisions. I loved Connor’s journey and would have liked more from Maya, but overall it worked for me.
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Thanks!
Thank you for the review. I was on the fence about this one. Age gap is one of my least favorite tropes. I can directly attribute that to starting my romance journey in the 70s when all the FMCs where under 20 and the MMCs were generally in their 30s. You’ve made a good case here so I’m putting my trust in you and Ali Hazelwood.
This sounds like exactly the kind of romance I need right now — low on dumb hurdles but there’s some sweetness. Thanks for the review!
I just finished Problematic Summer Romance and I really did not like Conor. I agree with the review that he had trauma but I’m getting tired of reading Ali Hazelwood books where the MMC is clearly in love with the female but can’t be bothered to figure out their emotions/hold a frank conversation with the FMC/go to therapy. In this book, the age gap kept being used a blunt force to stop any relationship discussions between two people who were clearly in love with each other. Hazelwood’s writing is really great, but she writes the same trope over and over again (he falls first but can’t admit his feelings for the whole book) and I spend the whole time wishing the MMCs would just talk to the FMCs.
I agree completely with @Elyse about the treatment of the brother’s best friend trope in this book, but for me, Conor’s journey was tiresome at times, with too much repetition of him telling Maya versions of “I’m too old for you.” Also agree that I would have liked more development of Maya’s character. However, this book is a follow-up to NOT IN LOVE, and I enjoyed revisiting characters from that novel via the wedding-related plot elements of PROBLEMATIC SUMMER ROMANCE.
This book had me moving Ali Hazlewood to my eh list. Her MMCs and their problems are too predictable at this point. It wouldn’t have bothered me a bit for the FMC to decide he just wasn’t worth the trouble.
I’m on fence about this one (which I note only because my taste nearly always aligns with Elise). With the exception of Kulti, age gaps are not my thing. (I only liked Kulti because it was a slow burn where the characters spent enough time for it to actually make sense.) As a 30-something woman it sometimes feel so disheartened that romance writers never pair men in their 30s with women in their 30s. It’s almost always 32 or 33 year-old-men with women that are 23-29. I think even Kate and Curran and Nevada and Rogan (my fave book couples) fall into this range. While I understand men in real life want this. It baffles me that women writing fantasy do this.
Loving the conversation here! I actually just re-read this book and I must say that MMC’s logic made even less sense the second time around. I found myself really wanting to tell Conor to get over himself. But you know what? I still really enjoyed the book. I adore pining and this book was full of excellent pining and self-sacrifice. The chemistry between the leads was really good. The characters were very appealing. It’s not my absolute favorite Hazelwood, but it’s also not my least favorite.
I looked forward to this book and liked it but it’s a B grade for me. Partly because I didn’t like Not in Love to the point I dnf’d it so another book peopled with those characters held little charm. The rest of my downgrade on it came from the absolute convenience of hark’s utter transformation into a grinning carefree guy who doesn’t have years of trauma and and self loathing to work through in therapy. I loved the pining and their history together but the thunderbolt of oh hey maybe it’s just all fine—that didn’t seem consistent with his character for me. Not that i need realism and I do love her romcoms.
I seem to only like Ali Hazelwood when she writes paranormals; Bride was one of my best books of last year, but nothing else she’s published has hit for me.