Reviewed by Larissa
TITLE: How to Evict a Hot Jock in Three Weeks
SERIES: How to Love Book #2
AUTHOR: Anyta Sunday
PUBLISHER: self-published
RELEASE DATE: November 28, 2020
LENGTH: 226 pages
BLURB:
THE UPTIGHT CURATOR . . .
Let’s list all the reasons why Logan Stone is the worst roommate for Alexander Kress to share his beloved house with.
He:
🐀 loves possum (over-sized rodent) for dinner
🐛 keeps worms in the fridge and hunts fishes with a spear
🚚 thinks monster trucks are theatre
😉 is clearly hiding something behind that twinkle in his eye
Plus he’s straight—and sexy. And Alexander needs to stop shivering.
THE CHEEKY THESPIAN . . .
Logan couldn’t have scripted it better.
Just one more day of obnoxious shenanigans and Alexander would evict his method-acting ass. Except, maybe he needs two days. Maybe a few more—
What is this man made of?
It’s almost like . . .
Shit. The cute curator knows what he’s up to. But he doesn’t know Logan knows he knows . . .
Wait. Back up. Did he just say cute?
REVIEW:
Perfectionism. Prevarication. Passion. Proof. Those four words aptly sum up this sometimes angsty but overwhelmingly heartwarming romance. Logan Stone and Alexander Kress are thrown together as roommates and they both have ulterior motives for that arrangement that cause them to work at cross-purposes – and they’re not what you’d expect.
Alexander is an art curator whose perfectionism and persnickety nature have driven off clients, friends and lovers. He has evicted a succession of roommates with his intolerance of everyone and everything that doesn’t perfectly meet his criteria. His brother Nico finally intervenes and challenges Alexander to change his ways through a bet, and it revolves around Alexander saying yes to everything his new roommate suggests and not evicting him for three weeks. The stakes? He gives up his home – his perfect, beloved home – for a year and lives instead in Nico’s 10th floor, small, confined apartment (did I mention Alexander is claustrophobic?) with a death trap of an elevator. Suffice it to say that Alexander is giving up a lot if he loses.
Enter the roommate – Logan. Logan is that guy who’s always the comedian, never taking anything seriously, and who gives up on everything because he doesn’t believe in himself enough to see things through. Logan is an actor and his paramount goal is to land a main part in an upcoming production at the Paragon theater that his brother runs and where he sort-of works. Logan’s perfectionist ex-girlfriend bets Logan that he can’t method act his way through three weeks in his new apartment so convincingly that he gets himself evicted. The stakes: If Logan loses the bet, he agrees to stay away from the theater that he loves and not audition for any roles there, including the main role that he is preparing to audition for.
So you see, Alexander and Logan have gotten themselves into quite the conundrum: Logan is doing everything he can to be the most offensive, intolerable roommate possible, suggesting and doing one outrageous thing after another, while Alexander is determined to not only tolerate, but participate in it all. From day one, their relationship is one of prevarication: evading truths, sidestepping assumptions, delivering lie upon lie, until it’s such a tangled web (“He doesn’t know I know he knows I know …”) that no one can tell who the other person really is, nor can they tell whether their feelings for each other are real.
Despite all the lies, one thing these two have in common is passion: they are both passionate about what they believe in and what they hold dear. For Alexander, it’s his family, his art and his left-leaning beliefs. For Logan, it’s his acting and the dedication toward getting the role, and to do right by the people he loves. That passion ultimately turns to each other, and that just adds more confusion to the swirling mix of lies and pretenses and countervailing goals. Another thing they have in common is that they are both alone and lonely in their own ways, and both have the need for proof that they can be different from what they’ve become, and in particular, that they can love and are worthy of love in return.
Alexander and Logan are well-written and well-developed characters with layers and dimensions that are exposed over the course of the book. Alexander, in particular, will get you right in the feels. He is crippled by his anxiety and need for control, but once given the opportunity through the bet proposed by Nico, he dedicates himself, desperately, to pushing himself beyond his limits. “There’s no true love for a rigid, picky perfectionist,” Alexander tells Nico. He doesn’t want to be alone without friends and without love so he needs this game of prevarication with Logan to push him and keep him outside his comfort zone. He wants to become something better but he recognizes he needs help, and he asks for it from the very person who can unravel it all. He begs Logan in a moment of uncommon vulnerability: “Don’t let me let you go.”
Logan’s struggle is to believe in himself and his worth. While he thought his stakes were a role, he realizes it’s actually much more fundamental: “‘Mine are all up here.’ Logan tapped his head and then his chest. ‘Or in there.’ … ‘Just feelings.’” But Alexander realizes it even before Logan does: “Weren’t feelings the biggest stake of all?” You bet they are.
This book is deceptively light-hearted and fun because it’s full of snappy dialogue and humor. But that’s just an overlay to a complex story of love, lies, proof and promise between two men pushing themselves to be more and trying to find proof that they’ve succeeded in their love for each other. This story is so much more than I expected and that is the best kind of feeling. You will love this story while you’re reading, and love it even more when you’re finished, because that’s when all the pieces of what you’ve just absorbed settle. Just wait for it because it’s then that you realize the book you just read was something special indeed.
RATING: 
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