New Adult Review: True

True by Erin McCarthy

Genre: New Adult

My Rating: 3 of 5 Stars

Goodreads Says: When Rory Macintosh’s roommates find out that their studious and shy friend has never been with a guy, they decide that, as an act of kindness they’ll help her lose her virginity by hiring confident, tattooed bad boy Tyler Mann to do the job…unbeknownst to Rory.

Tyler knows he’s not good enough for Rory. She’s smart, doctor smart, while he’s barely scraping by at his EMT program, hoping to pull his younger brothers out of the hell their druggy mother has left them in. But he can’t resist taking up her roommates on an opportunity to get to know her better. There’s something about her honesty that keeps him coming back when he knows he shouldn’t…

Torn between common sense and desire, the two find themselves caught up in a passionate relationship. But when Tyler’s broken family threatens to destroy his future, and hers, Rory will need to decide whether to cut her ties to his risky world or follow her heart, no matter what the cost…

I enjoyed this read and it was well written, for the most part.  It’s definitely a bit deeper and complicated than the synopsis leads you to think.  I liked the characters enough even if the girls in the book were a bit too immature for my taste. Yet, there were deeper issues within that really rubbed me the wrong way.  

This might be spoiler-ish, tread carefully, although what I’ll reveal doesn’t really spoil anything about the meat of the story. 

With most contemporaries, I find that it’s hard for me to really relate to some of the characters because I’m not like them,  wasn’t like them,  and I often find myself saying I would have never made the decisions they make. However, I can have an open mind and think that some of the things I read in books are plausible because isn’t that what reading/telling stories is about? It is, but dang, I can only have an open mind for so long.

The story opens up with a sexual assault. Rory is the naïve and awkward girl who has never really had a real adult experience with a guy.  While out one night, Rory's alone in the living room with a guy she’s kind of crushing on, more like curious about, while her two roommates are getting their groove on in the bedrooms.  The guy is reading Rory all wrong and even though Rory is up for messing around she didn’t think it would get as serious as it was getting. Rory finds herself being forced into performing oral sex on the guy when the hero of the story stops it.  She realizes real quickly that she could have been raped.

I didn’t have a problem with this because this can totally happen. I had a big problem with what happened about half way through the book.  Rory invites this same kid into the same apartment and has a pretty normal conversation with him. She didn’t let anyone in the apartment know that he was there nor did she act scared or even a bit apprehensive.  It was like nothing had happened between the two as serious as a possible rape. This was their first encounter since the first chapter of the book...

Something else that was pretty crazy, Rory overhears her two roommates talking about how they paid the hero of the story to sleep with her. These are the same two roommates that know about her almost rape yet proceed to get this guy to accept sex for pay.  To top it all off Rory decides to keep quiet about it and just go with it.

Sheesh, man…

These were pretty serious and things I couldn’t ignore since I don’t think they added to the story. There were other ways the author could have gone about getting what she wanted to achieve. 

ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley.