Book Review: Rush Me by Allison Parr

At First Sight: Rachel Hamilton is living the post-grad dream in New York City, or at least attempting to as she tries to land a paid position in publishing and have fun with her friends. 

One night while out at a party with a friend, she ends up crashing a different party by mistake, and walks into the world of the New York Leopards - a famous American football team she's completely clueless about, since she doesn't follow sports at all.

At the party she meets Ryan Carter, one of the league's most beloved quarterbacks, and they don't get off to the most auspicious start. But then, Rachel ends up becoming a pet of sorts to the rest of the team, and is basically adopted by Abe - a rookie player who misses his family in California, and who attaches himself to Rachel since she's the only jewish person he knows in NYC. 

Little by little, Ryan and Rachel start to spend time together and change their impressions of each other, but things are never easy when you thrown fame and indecision into the mix. 

Second Glance: Rush Me was a fun little contemporary (it's not very long at all, clocking about 240 pages in all), but it has quite a nice pace that allow the story to move on without feeling very rushed. However, sometimes it seemed like there were scenes missing - like, where did everyone got Rachel's phone number? and Ryan and Rachel go from not really talking much at all, to him letting her spend the night at his house - and that was perhaps one of my biggest problems with the book.  

The other problem I had is that Ryan and Rachel fight over the silliest things, to the point where I did face-palm a few times, and kept thinking they both had a lot of growing up to do - on one hand it made sense because Rachel is like 23 and Ryan about 26 or so, but on the other hand it really annoyed me sometimes. 

But, other than that, the book was actually lots of fun to read, the writing was good and the characters engaging. I liked Ryan and Rachel, and Abe and the other people of their world and I do look forward to the next book by the author, since she does a great job of portraying the chemistry between the characters. 

Bottom Line: I really hope my review doesn't sound negative, because I don't really have negative feelings toward Rush Me, it was fun and easy to read and had likable characters all around. Sometimes it was a little surreal but that was about it. 

1/2