For the past year or so, I’ve been in a reading rut, and this book was unfortunately to blame.
Exes and O’s in the second book in the Influencer series by Amy Lea. The first in the series is Set On You, which I reviewed here.
This time around, we follow booksagram influencer Tara Chen, who, after a failed engagement, decides maybe the “second-chance romance” trope will be her chance to find love. While documenting her plans to her followers, they catch a glimpse of Trevor Metcalfe, her hot firefighter roommate. Seeing her fans’ interest in Trevor, Tara ropes him into helping her hunt for her past lovers. It doesn’t take long for the pair to develop feelings for each other, especially in the face of all Tara’s terrible exes.
For those who don’t know, the second-chance romance trope is when the couple who fall in love in the story are reunited exes. Their time apart is supposed to allow the couple to grow as individuals. Once they reunite, they are meant to be perfect for each other because they would have grown beyond whatever past problems that broke them up in the first place.
As fun as this premise sounds, I immediately noticed a problem. Something we learn early on is that Tara has always been the one getting dumped, but she never considers their reasons for dumping her in her search for these men. She never unpacks her flaws and why she wasn’t good for these men in the first place.
And boy, does she have problems.
In all honesty, Tara is delusional. She thinks love works the same way it does in romance novels, which is ironic considering the setting, and this mindset has led her to bad romance after bad romance. Tara is so desperate to get married that she barely cares if she’s happy in the relationship, and if a guy rejects her, then he’s the problem.
Anything bad an ex says about her is labeled as gaslighting or the guys just being jerks. When an ex makes legitimate criticism about her behavior, she will deny it out loud only to justify that behavior and discredit him in her head. This is especially jarring when it’s revealed that Tara has been seeing a therapist on-and-off since high school to help her with breakups. It’s clear that, in an attempt to elevate Tara’s self-worth after breakups, the therapist inadvertently contributed to Tara’s inability to accept criticism.
By the end of the story, Tara convinces herself that her problem is that she was trying to settle for guys who couldn’t appreciate how extra she was. She doesn’t need to learn from her past relationships or grow as a person. She believes that she’s perfect just the way she is. The story frames Tara ending up with Trevor as finding a guy who could finally handle her while completely ignoring the fact that her not viewing him as a romantic partner at first allowed her to relax and be herself around him long enough to form a genuine connection.
Tara never learns from her past mistakes. She never grows. Her character never experiences an arc.
Despite all my complaints, I enjoyed this novel more than the first novel in the series. Despite her delusions, Tara is ten times more likable than her sister Crystal. I enjoy the relationship between Trevor and Tara and how it’s built on friendship and mutual respect, though it does lose points because Trevor isn’t all that interesting. He feels more like a trope than a character. He is a hot firefighter playboy with a heart of gold, and that’s pretty much it.
I rate this book 3 terrible exes out of 5.
While I had a lot of problems with the story, none of it was bad enough for me to stop reading (and by the time it was, I was in the final chapters). That being said, I’ll be avoiding Amy Lea’s books for the foreseeable future.
Until next time!
I Think Thinks 