Reviewed by Valerie
TITLE: Hostile
AUTHOR: Nicole Dykes
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
LENGTH: 299 pages
RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2022
BLURB:
Grayson
Life has been easy for me. Top of my class. Star quarterback of the football team. Every guy wants to be my friend, and every girl wants to date me.
Yeah, life is pretty sweet.
Except it’s not.
It’s all fake. School comes too easy for me, and I’m bored. Football isn’t fun anymore. The guys I hang out with aren’t really my friends.
And the girls? I don’t want to date them.
The only one I want to date . . . He’s a little bit . . . hostile.
Rhett
Life has never been easy for me. A foster kid, lucky enough to be adopted as a teen but who still can’t find a way to be happy.
I have two best friends who are amazing and supportive, and yet, I can’t bring myself to tell them my biggest secret.
Parents who pay for a private school a kid like me could never have dreamed of . . . that I hate.
It feels all wrong when it should feel right.
And I guess . . . that’s made me nothing but . . . hostile.
REVIEW:
In this opposites attract, new adult romance, two young men from very different backgrounds struggle with trust and family issues until they find each other and fill those holes – I mean voids – for the other.
Rhett’s had a tough early life. His biological parents signed away their rights and he spent his first thirteen years in foster care. His adoptive parents are loving and wonderful by any measure – they even adopted his two best friends – but Rhett feels like a fraud, like he doesn’t deserve his current privileged life of private school, new cars, and every material desire he could have. His trust issues are deeply ingrained. Everyone failed him during his childhood: the system, foster parents, social workers, and teachers. Although grateful for the new life he was given, he’s angry, moody, and at times, insufferable. Feeling he shouldn’t take anything more from his parents, he decides to move out on his own as soon as he turns eighteen, even though he’s still in high school. He’s broken but can’t explain that to his family.
“They spend so much time telling me how good I am, but I just can’t get past the fact that if I were so damn good, my parents wouldn’t have given me up.”
Grayson’s life is the polar opposite. He is the only child of very wealthy, very cold parents who show him no love. Life is all about prestige and appearances to them. He’s the golden boy, the great student and star quarterback, Mr. Popularity with all the girls he could want (read: none). He does everything he’s “supposed” to do to please his father who has Grayson’s entire life mapped out: Ivy League college, a respectable job in his father’s company, and marriage to a good woman. He wants none of that, though. He’s drowning in everyone’s expectations but doesn’t know how to save himself. Until he decides to pursue the “beautiful broken boy” at school.
Grayson has been obsessed with Rhett for three years and begins to stalk him (“obsessed” and “stalk” are not used in the dangerous sense but rather a pesky way). He follows Rhett around, sits at his lunch table and invites himself to do volunteer work alongside Rhett. It becomes quite humorous when he won’t back down, insisting to Rhett that they’re going to be best friends. He’s relentless as he tries to wear him down. It’s annoying to Rhett but wasn’t to me – I found it endearing that Grayson cared so much.
Despite their obvious differences, they are both lost in their own ways and they’re both closeted. Rhett doesn’t know his sexuality – maybe asexual? Again, he feels broken. He’s never been attracted to anyone before but that changes when he and Grayson begin a hidden relationship which begins as “friends who maybe kiss.”
I love Rhett’s siblings and adoptive parents to the same degree I hate Grayson’s sperm and egg donors. They all enrich the story, for better or worse.
I adore new adult novels because they often deal with young adults who are trying to discover who they are as they strive to become their true selves. In Hostile, Nicole Dykes takes two lost souls on a journey of self-discovery as they gain independence, support each other, help each other grow, and fall in love. It’s a plot I thoroughly enjoyed. Rhett and Grayson are both likable, sympathetic characters; while most of us probably can’t relate to their exact circumstances, we can find similarities to the angst we suffered as teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, tying to figure out our identities. This is one of the reasons I really enjoyed this well-written story. Another is the wonderful epilogue set seven years in the future. Highly recommended.
RATING:
BUY LINKS:
[…] Reviewed by Valerie […]
[…] Reviewed by Valerie […]