I finished reading
The Love Game by Emma Hart this morning.
Basically the book is about Braden, a good looking player, and Maddie, a straight laced girl from Brooklyn, who both attend University in California. One night while out with friends, Braden states that he wants to sleep with Maddie, however she is not the sort of girl that sleeps around and the only way into her pants is for her to fall in love with him. On this same night, Maddie and her friends decide that someone has to teach Braden what is it like to be used for sex and then disgarded, therefore they decide that Maddie needs to make Braden fall in love with her, sleep with him and then leave him. And thus the story begins.
They realise that first impressions aren't always right. Maddie realises that there is more to Braden than the egotistical person she preserved him to be, he is kind, caring and most importantly someone she can talk to. Braden learns that Maddie isn't as straight laced as she asks and that she has seen more pain in her life than most see in their lifetime. Along the way, they realise that they both have failed with their plan to 'hump and dump' when they accept that they have real feeling for each other and they fall in love.
When I read the blurb reminded me of the movie
How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, as the storyline has similarities, however the book is more about finding and falling in love, and also about fighting and not giving up when love becomes hard.
The book is written in the perspective of both Maddie and Braden, which sometimes can ruin a book as the authors has to their style of writting so that the audience can get a full feeling of the personality of each character. I think that Emma Hart does this well in this book with Braden, however when she is writting in the POV of Maddie, I think it would have been better. Maddie is a character that has suffered so much sadness with her mother being killed in a drive by shooting (which Maddie witnessed), which lead to her fathers struggle with depression and her brothers drug addiction. When reading the book from Maddie's perspective, you do not feel the sadness and worry that Maddie is expereincing unless Maddie is talking about her parents.
One thing I really liked about the book is that when Maddie was retelling the story about her mother's death and her best friend's attempted suicide, Hart takes the story back to when it was happening, which made me feel like it was happening right then and there and really made you feel the sadness and helplessness that Maddie was feeling at the time of the event.
Another thing that I really loved about this book was that Maddie and Braden didn't instantally fall in love, Emma Hart made the characters gradually fall in like, then in love with each other. And even when they realised that they had fallen in love with each other, they were reluctant to acknowledge their feelings. In most of the books that I have read lately, there is instant love which is so unrealistic and it was nice to read a book that was believable.
As a whole, I really enjoyed this book and would read it again, and read other books written by Emma Hart. She is a great writer!
Let me know what you thought of the book...
If you read my post last week, you will know that I had been set a challenge by my 'coach' Jenny to read three books by the end of the weekend... Well it is Monday morning now and the weekend is well and truely over and I only managed to complete two books. I am 70% into my third book now so I nearly did it, by still not good enough! :( 
