I throughly enjoyed this novel. In fact, it’s one of the few lately that has held my attention throughout the entire story. While I could see a few things coming, I never felt like rushing though it. I would definitely recommend it to friends.

As someone who works on a campsite and a camper myself, the cover is what drew me in. And when I read the synopsis, I got so excited. But wow was this book boring. DNF'd 34% in. I just could not get through it. Both characters were so infuriating and annoying.

4.5!
I wish I had picked up this book sooner because it had all my guilty pleasures in one! As a lover of hiking and PNW native, this book tugged at my outdoorsy side in all the best ways. I felt like I could envision the mountains and trails and struggles of camping and hiking. Throwing in romance was icing on the cake.

If the outdoors wasn't enough, Lisa Gayle made it into a reality TV competition and I couldn't have been more invested. I was rooting for and against certain characters all the while thinking how amazing this story would be made into a movie. Because honestly, who doesn't love a competitive reality TV show. It's America's guilty pleasire!

A must read! My only complaint was how rushed it felt. I can't wait for the next installment.

Thanks so much netgalley for the ARC!

5 stars!

I picked up Crush in the Cascades by Lisa S Gayle thinking it looked kind of cute. So wrong. I was so so wrong. I can’t get over how much I loved this book. It’s romance with action! And for the record, I don’t watch any reality TV shows, but I’d totally watch the one described in this book.

Amity and Cooper are both contestants in an outdoors, fitness, adventure reality TV show. The winning team wins $2 million - `$1M for each member of the team. First impressions weigh heavily on all the contestants as they size each other up eventually forming alliances along the way.

As the challenges increase in intensity (though they all seemed rather intense to me!), and whether paired up with each other or not, Amity and Cooper start falling for each other. As they begin to open up, they learn the real reasons behind why they entered the contest.

As for the ending. Sigh. All the feels!

Side notes:

* I love that we got to know a handful of characters. I hope we’ll hear more from some of them in the sequel.
* Oh yeah - did I mention this is totally set up for a sequel?
* Are we going to get any sort of backstory on Goatee Man? No really. I’ve gotta know.

Thanks to NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Enemies to lovers is my all time favorite trope and this book delivers in that aspect. I enjoyed the banter in the first half of the book. The second half’s romance was a little lacking for me though.

I was looking forward to reading this as the premise sounded intriguing. An enemies to lovers story based around an adventure challenge being filmed for a TV series. Unfortunately one of the main characters, Cooper was misogynistic from the very beginning and continued to be judgemental right through to the end. There was also a fair chunk of the book where the characters only ever seemed to go on about sex and it had me rolling my eyes at several points. I found their relationship irritating and childish at best.

I did, however, enjoy the overall plot and reading about the different challenges they were facing in a beautiful setting. The TV series aspect was interesting to read about to so those things are what saved the book for me.

I really wanted to love this book, the elements of it were all things that I genuinely enjoy. Unfortunately this one missed the mark big time.

Firstly, the book feels far too long. It’s repetitive and at times boring, with characters making choices that didn’t line up with what we know them to be like.
The characters then felt very frustrating, making decisions with an illogical rationale, making them seem childish.

I wish I loved this, but I sadly didn’t.

Oof, the writing was so bad that it was a quick DNF for me.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC for an honest review.

Crush in the Cascades is a romcom featuring Amity, a high maintenance California girl, and Ethan, a rugged outdoorsman. They are both competing for a million dollars in a reality TV gameshow that is The Bachelor meets Survivor.
This book had multiple tropes that I am a big fan of: enemies to lovers, forced proximity, opposites attract, reality TV show setting. I appreciated that it was dual perspective as well, allowing us to see both Amity and Ethan's POVs. But unfortunately it also had my least favorite trope: instalove. I also didn't enjoy the miscommunication between the two characters.
Overall, it was a fun rom-com in a fantastic setting, but I like a little more substance to my romances.

I really wished that I loved this book more that I did. It was just okay. I hoped that his one woučd be somthing else, but it isn't.
I is beuutiful written, but it is not my cup of tea.

I wanted to love this but it simply wasn't for me. I thought I was more of a romance reader than I am turning out to be. I definitely think there's an audience for this, the writing style is great, it's just not for me.

I liked that the book had a different type of setting, a reality tv show. That was pretty much all I liked though. The book wasn't necessarily bad, it just could have been improved in several areas. The characters were hard to connect with, and I don't think the romance aspect of the plot was well-written. To me the book was just kind of "meh". Not terrible but not a stand out either. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy.

I did not enjoy this book as much as I wanted to. I loved the premise and I enjoyed both main characters, but not together. This was a classic example of "don't make assumptions" and it was increasingly frustrating when the main characters were still making assumptions about each other and making drastic decisions based on those assumptions without having a simple coverversation. The survival game aspect was interesting but hard to follow in book format and there were a lot of characters to keep track of. I didn't really care about any of them at the end of the book.

Synopsis:
Desperate for cash, Easton Cooper decides he’ll compete on an outrageous action-adventure reality show, and he hates reality TV. But there’s a catch—he’s staring across the meadow at his partner—a tan, hot, out-of-place California girl, wearing heels and a formal dress in the middle of freaking nowhere—and she will not bring him down! Even if he has to drag her across the finish line. Amity Rose wants an adventure. No one told her that “dress accordingly” meant deck out in hardcore mountain gear. So she wore strappy heels and a fancy dress to the opening scene. Her partner is the worst—a gangly, overconfident, know-it-all mountain trail guide. Did the directors just add a romantic twist to the drama? Sure, why not? Maybe she’ll leave the race with something more valuable than money. Just not with him!

Review:
I liked the game show aspect of this book and the competition. The race to riches or romance was like a mix of The Amazing Race and Bachelor in Paradise. I thought the challenges were fun. I haven't read a romcom with an athletic competition setting before, so that part was new and fun. However, I found it hard to connect with the characters. Cooper was hard to like from the beginning. He was really judgmental from the start and was hard on Amity. Because of this, I didn't like the romance between Cooper and Amity. It seemed to come out of nowhere and it seemed unrealistic. I really enjoy the enemies-to-lovers trope, but I just wasn't feeling this one. The ending seemed rushed to me as well. Overall, this book fell short for me. However, I did like the setting and the idea of the competition, so I might read the second book to this series with Cooper's sister.

the writing in this one was hard for me to get through. i didn't find myself pulling for either of the characters. the plot fell flat and i didn't like easton at. all. i felt forced to finish and really struggled through this book.

"Hollywood" and "Easton" are competing on a outdoor reality show for romance or riches.
I didn't like that she couldn't really be upfront to him about why she was there. Especially because she loves him.
It seemed like everything happened to fast but that's how romance books go.

The concept of the reality show was nice. But the characters were meh. Couldn't connect with the characters. Especially Easton he was a big no. I ended up DNFing this book.

★★ 2 stars

I always feel optimistic when requesting and receiving ARCs. I'm just always thrilled to be reading something new that I rarely pay attention to the possibility that I may not like it, I mean I'm not going to request something that I don't find interesting. So you see, when it happens that I didn't enjoy the book, I feel bad for giving it a low rating. This is one of those reads.

At one point in time I did love watching breezy and trashy reality tv with my parents no less, us Asians just love our drama and bitch-slapping. As a trope I'm sure that's just going to be deliciously chaotic if not outright riot like we see in tv. At least that's what I'm hoping for in Crush in the Cascades.

Usually I'm a charming assholes kind o' gal but by God, Easton Cooper is one hateful bastard. He opened the book with insults after insults after insults. I mean, man calm your mouth and thoughts down, will 'ya? Do we think that's adorable? Ugh gross. Do we think boys 'like' girls when they insult them? Sweetie, no. It's 2022, we don't do that no 'mo. Nakakagigil!


The more he insults her both verbally and in his thoughts, he falls in deeply with his physical attraction to her. Not because Amity has proven herself to be a worthy competitor or that she's showed herself to be the opposite of his first impression (not that it ever stopped him from being an asshole at all) but because she is physically attractive to him, the very same thing he's blasted her about in the beginning of the contest, on camera to be shown in live tv for the whole world to see. It even said " the bug bites and scrapes peppered across her skin turned him on even more". Oh, Lord …

Nothing to say about Amity. Everyone was so mean to her so naturally I rooted for her. Yeah well ... I liked her enough until she ran trail wearing hot pink lace thong and left her backbone somewhere in the Cascades, completely abandoning her female resolve. Who does that?

The ending was like "I'm sorry", "ok haha". What?!

NOT ENOUGH GROVEL!

Don't get me wrong, I love a good ole fashioned are-we-fighting-or-is-this-foreplay kind of romcom but I'm not feeling the comedy nor am I giddy with the prospect of romance specially on Easton's side. I'm not feeling sexual tension. I'm getting major misogynistic prick, domineering asshole-who-may-or-may-not-be-overcompensating-for-something vibes. It's eww vibes.

Mood setting is very important to me. If I cant feel it, it simply would not work for me —that's my first, should I say obstacle in reading this one. It was a lot work on my part to visualize the settings and I am a runner both road and trail. It should be easy for me to conjure up the images this is describing but most of the time time I'm supplementing it with my own trail running recollection. Would I be wrong to expect that this book should at least have met me halfway in that department?

I wish I could say that the imagery improved as the story goes on but to me it felt short in feeding me the vision of the outdoors, the nature experience and accurately depicting the sweet discomfort of being in the trail. I'm not feeling it. And because there wasn't enough of those, I was not convinced that there was enough 'hardship' to bond these people at all. In fact, I felt like the major challenge was the production team of the whole show for being pricks all the time.

A prologue would be nice, if reality tv has 3-minute trailers, why not add a prologue? I felt like I was thrown in the middle of something with no basic sense of what's going on. I guess if it was mimicking the emotions of the characters particularly in Amity's viewpoint that would work for me but this isn't in dual pov.

I'm afraid I didn't much warm up to Easton's antics. I felt like the plot was set to fit his character instead of both him and Amity together as a couple. And the more it tried to fit Easton's attitude in the narrative the more it becomes ridiculous. His attitude is so ugly that no matter how good the story tried to spin his character it just didn't work for me. Even I wouldn't want to be around this guy if it were real life.

I'd say I'm an easy enough person. It's either goosebumps never lie or cringe never lie. On this one, it's the latter.

Thanks so much to Netgalley for the copy!

Plot: ★★
Writing: ★★

Publication date: 02 May 2022>

I received an advance copy in exchange for honest thoughts and review.

I truly partook in this book . In the event that you honestly love carefree sentiment, this is an ideal book for you. We have our testy activity man brought together with an alleged spoilt rich young lady, put together on an unscripted television program. The cameras follow everything they might do, including comical difficulties they need to confront. The book snared drive straight in.

Read the complete run in both deluxe editions. The two main characters are a radio shock jock and his girl friend. He is horribly obnoxious and self centered and she is dumb. The guy is so awful that it makes no sense the girl likes him, much less loves him. Great premise but the execution did not work for me at all.