Daisy Emmett has been enemies with famous romance author Caleb Miller since they were in college together, and time hasn’t lessened their mutual loathing. So when she agrees to manoeuvre him through a PR disaster of his own making, she knows it’s not going to be easy. She just doesn’t realise how not easy until they somehow end up trapped in the same truck, on an endless road trip from one book tour stop to another, bantering and butting heads along the way.
Then, even more horrifying: people appear to be mistaking her for the woman he dedicates all his books to. The love of his life, his adored beloved―the one who doesn’t actually exist. Now they’re trapped into pretending she does and that Daisy is her, each fake kiss and phoney embrace ratcheting up the tension to the point where enemies suddenly seems a lot closer to lovers than either of them would like.
Or so they’re telling themselves.
But sometimes it’s hard to be sure, when seething turns into something so much more… (Synopsis courtesy of Amazon.)
Charlotte Stein writes her fictional men the way I like my fictional men: big, burly and grouchy, with soft, gooey insides that only a uniquely written female protagonist can truly discover. Caleb is that big, burly grouchy man, with the same type of personality that Daisy remembers from their college years. He hasn’t changed a bit. Has he? After not seeing each other for years, he’s still as cantankerous as always, even after she’s agreed to help him soften his image.
The book tour they’ve set out on is one disaster after another. There is no comfort for Daisy when she’s with Caleb, particularly with how standoffish he can be. When the general public begins to believe that Daisy is the love of Caleb’s life and the inspiration behind his books, it makes things even more awkward. It’s hard to know for sure if the public’s persona lends into seeing Caleb a little differently as the days and traveling pushes the two characters closer together than either would have anticipated, or maybe Daisy is starting to see the reasons behind Caleb’s tough outer shell. But when he brushes a hand on her, even by accident, or when there is some form of PDA for social media’s benefit, what started out as repulsion begins to die down into something akin to yearning. Daisy is just as shocked by this revelation as anyone would be!
The chapters showcase the current timeframe, with the book tour, and there are also flashbacks provided by Daisy’s point of view of her college experiences with Caleb. It really helped to formulate more of an opinion as to why Caleb is the way he is, and the reader learns that maybe what has been seething really has been longing disguised as seething all along. They’re both quirky characters, which was nice to see–and they both engage in a lot of back and forth banter that felt more like verbal foreplay than anything else. Given some of the scenes within this book, I’d have to say I’m right on the money about that.
There’s a taming of the beast mentality that is an undercurrent within While You Were Seething, and I was there for it, 100%. But the longer Daisy blends into Caleb’s world, she discovers she’s got a little bit of the beast within her too, and Caleb is more romantic than he’d ever imagined himself to be, even if he’d never admit to it. It was the classic opposites attract, enemies turned potential lovers genre that was a lot of fun to read!
Thanks to St. Martin's Press for the book in exchange for an honest review.
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