Book Review | The Love Interest by Cale Dietrich

The Love Interest
by Cale Dietrich

There is a secret organization that cultivates teenage spies. The agents are called Love Interests because getting close to people destined for great power means getting valuable secrets.

Caden is a Nice: the boy next door, sculpted to physical perfection. Dylan is a Bad: the brooding, dark-souled guy who is dangerously handsome. The girl they are competing for is important to the organization, and each boy will pursue her. Will she choose the Nice or the Bad?

Both Caden and Dylan are living in the outside world for the first time. They are well-trained and at the top of their games. They have to be—whoever the girl doesn’t choose will die.

What the boys don’t expect are feelings that are outside of their training. Feelings that could kill them both.

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I'm keeping this one short.

It's actually been a few days since I read this and I'm only writing the review now. I blame it on the rat race - need to work to be able to buy more books *wink*. I was given hype by a lot of bookstagramers, so I put it in my TBR. I figured out it was an LGBT book in the first chapter - seriously, even if the male characters were trained and molded to look good, the way the protagonist described himself and the other main character was a little too off. I'm not saying it's a bad thing though, it's just that it's not your typical YA trope.

It had a simple premise - 2 boys, one Nice and one Bad, were sent out to be the Love Interest of a girl who had a bright future. Whoever the girl chooses wins and the loser either gets incinerated or memory wiped and then put to other uses. That's basically it, the majority of the content is a little shallow for me especially the parts where they Nice and the Bad had scripts to follow and stage scenes where they could show off how good they looked and endear themselves to the girl character. A lot of the scenes were flat and so predictable I'm still wondering how I got through the book.  

Some characters were mixed into the fray and then killed off unnecessarily, and then the part where they go back to the company who makes Love Interests lacked the adrenaline factor that most other YA would have churned out.

I'm just a little bit disappointed after all the hype and the book fell a little short. 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐