Review: I Want It That Way by Ann Aguirre

I Want It That Way by Ann Aguirre

Nadia Conrad has big dreams, and she's determined to make them come true. But between maintaining her college scholarship and working at the local day care to support herself, dating's the last thing on her mind. Then she moves into a new apartment and meets the taciturn yet irresistible guy in 1B….

Daniel Tyler has grown up too fast. Becoming a single dad at twenty turned his life upside down—and brought him heartache he can't risk again. Now, as he raises his four-year-old son while balancing a full-time construction management job and night classes, the last thing he wants is noisy students living in the apartment upstairs. But one night, Nadia's and Ty's paths cross, and soon they can't stay away from each other.

The timing is all wrong—but love happens when it happens. And you can't know what you truly need until you stand to lose it.

Not gonna lie: I had that damn Backstreet Boys song pop into my head every time I looked at the book cover. If that was Ms. Aguirre’s purpose, then mission accomplished. And now that I look at the titles of the other books in the 2B Trilogy (As Long As You Love Me, out now, and The Shape of My Heart, which is coming out in November of 2014), I see that my boyband earworm was indeed a purposeful thing. Confession: I went through my boyband phase with New Kids on the Block in the early 90s, so I never liked the Backstreet Boys.

I didn’t enjoy having that song stuck in my head for at least a week, but I did, however, enjoy this book a lot. It’s actually the first New Adult novel I’ve read, and while I couldn’t exactly relate to Nadia, the protagonist, as a college student, I found myself sucked into the delightfully angsty oh-but-we-mustn’t love story.

The book gets off to a pretty slow start. It took a good 120 pages for me to feel like the plot was really moving forward, which is admittedly a pretty long stretch. The early part of the book is about establishing Nadia’s life as a college student for the most part; we’re introduced to her roommates, learn about her job and her major/classes, and move through the first stages of her immediate attraction to Ty, her handsome downstairs neighbor.

I do wish things had moved a bit more quickly in this part of the book. It took me longer to get through it than I would normally take, and once the plot started really rolling, I blasted through the rest of the book really quickly. And it wasn’t necessarily a slow burn sort of thing. It’s obvious that Nadia and Ty like each other right off the bat and are both attracted to each other. It just took a while to move past Nadia’s every day minutiae and into their blossoming not-a-relationship.

You see, Ty is a 24 year old single father who doesn’t think he’s worthy of being loved. He insisted his former girlfriend have their baby when she clearly didn’t want to be a mother, and when she understandably left him after Sam was born, he basically swore off love. Now, let me be clear: I think anyone insisting that a woman have a baby when she doesn’t want one is a pretty crappy person, and at first I was ready to write Ty off as a jerk. But he shows such remorse and realistic conflict about the situation. He knows it was wrong to force his ex to have a baby, and he feels horrible about it, but at the same time, his son is the light of his life. It’s a complicated situation, and I feel like Ms Aguirre handled it pretty well.

Nadia is a very likable character. She’s level-headed and mature for a 21 year old, and I enjoyed reading from her point of view more than I expected to. It’s been a long time since I was 21, and I was afraid at first that she’d read like some of the more irritating YA lit protagonists I’ve run across. But she’s not at all like that; she’s sensible and smart, and even her occasional breakdowns are completely understandable and relatable.

The romance is more of a friends with benefits situation with a generous dash of repressed love, and that is catnip to me. I love stories where the characters have to pretend they don’t have feelings for each other for whatever reason, and once Nadia and Ty start sleeping together, I was completely hooked. I thought the romance was very satisfying, and I hope the other books in the trilogy keep up such a great emotional payoff.

I’m already a fan of Ann Aguirre’s other series, so I was expecting to enjoy this book despite the new-to-me genre. I was pleasantly surprised, though, at just how much I liked it. The slow start made me waffle between 3.5 and 4 stars, but in the end, the sheer pleasure I got out of the romance bumped it up to four. It’s a good read.

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• 2014 Reading Challenges
• Pamela's 20 Book Challenge

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