Willa is a star soccer play at her university with dreams of playing professional soccer and the skills and determination to actually get there. If she can pass her Business Math class that is. After missing classes for a game, she is upset when the professor refuses to give her a copy of the lecture notes, telling her to instead get them from another classmate who has them. When said classmate, Ryder Bergman, doesn’t respond to her attempts to get his attention, her ire grows believing him to be an asshole and that the professor is giving the man special treatment. But unbeknownst to her, Ryder is late deafened and just didn’t hear her. Once that misunderstanding is cleared up, and the professor assigns them to work with one another on a project, the two get to know one another and they find themselves attracted to one another. But when tragedy strikes and Willa shuts Ryder out, can their budding romance survive?
This was recommended to me (and given as a birthday gift last year) by my book bestie Amy, who used to do the FanFiction Readalikes here. She knew I’d like the disability representation in this series. But I have a mixed reaction to this series opener which follows five brothers and two sisters in the Bergman family. Why it’s called the Bergman Brothers and not Siblings, I don’t know.
But I didn’t like Willa. I found her an entitled athlete, which I hate, and so sure she was this soccer goddess her only plan was to get signed to a professional team. Let’s face it, not every college athlete is that good and going to get signed, so this annoyed me. I also hated that she was too stupid to figure out that Ryder was Deaf on her own. The man has the lecture notes, and is using them to follow the lecture, the lecture is freaking closed captioned (which she notices), and he doesn’t respond when you talk to him. And her response is that he’s an asshole who’s ignoring her? Not “Oh, the lecture is closed captioned, I wonder if someone here is deaf?”. Even after she realizes, she’s apologetic, but then gets mad when she realizes he’s been wearing his hearing aid without telling her so she starts a damn petty and childish war with him where she basically sexually teases him. I’m sorry, but it made me really not like her.
I did like Ryder. The edition I read has been edited after being read by a sensitivity reader with the same experience as his, and it showed. It was a great picture of a young man still coming to terms with his deafness and how he fits into the world and how he wants to communicate from now on. However, since my university required the meningitis vaccine to live in the dorms, and he was supposed to have been moving into the athlete dorms (seriously, schools have such a thing? Guess my school was too small to have that), I would have thought he’d been vaccinated and thus not been at risk of catching it. So as a reason for his deafness I found it a bit unusual.
I also didn’t buy the romance. I bought Ryder’s side, but not Willas. She was clearly physically/sexually attracted to him, but I didn’t buy she actually fell in love with him. She was so closed off emotionally for everything but anger it seemed and so into her own thing I just didn’t feel like she was ready for an adult relationship, even if she’s supposed to be in therapy and working through her issues at the end. Her realizations he cares for him as more than a friend only happens because she gets jealous.
As a series starter, it’s weak. However, I liked meeting his other siblings and am curious enough, and liked the disability representation enough to continue the series. Each book features at least on of the MCs with a chronic illness or disability, so they are right up my alley. And I like the dual POV because you get both sides of the story. The next book features one of Ryder’s brothers who is a professional hockey player and the team’s PR woman who uses a cane (seen on the cover). About half the series is sports romances (ugh), but I’ll stick with it for at least the next couple of books, especially since book three features Ryder’s older sister Freya and her husband who just happens to by Ryder and Willa’s professor.
Three Lightsabers for this one.
The Ramblings of a Jedi Librarian 