[ARC REVIEW] “Just About Over You” (Prospect Street #2) By: Carrie Aarons

The second book in Carrie Aarons’ Prospect Street series is here! (You can also take a look at my review of the first book, “Then You Saw Me”!)

What is “Just About Over You” by Carrie Aarons about?

What’s the worst thing you could hear your best friend, who you’ve always secretly been in love with, say? That would be telling another girl he could envision her being his wife.

I just about died when Gannon Raferty, the boy who used to borrow my pencils in elementary school, said that to the lead of the reality dating show he was cast on. Though he didn’t win her heart, he’s now a bona fide sensation when he returns to our college and moves back into the off-campus house we share.

The torch I carry for him has always been one-sided; I’m head-over-heels, soulmate-level into him while he views me as a lovable kid sister. So I decide this school year will be the one where I move on, where I finally attempt to open my heart to another. After all, if he can make declarations of undying love to someone he just met, but not to me, that’s the biggest wake-up call I could ever receive.

Until one night early on in the semester, when we accidentally sleep together. Because of course he’s going to confess his feelings now, when I was ready to give up on there ever being an us.

But just as Gannon starts admitting exactly what I’ve always wanted to hear, I get devastating news. And suddenly, I don’t want to risk losing him as a best friend. I’ve already lost too many people I love, and am on the brink of adding one more to that list.

If our romance goes south, I don’t how I’ll ever come back from it. Not only the crushing heartbreak, but the fact that we can never go back to how we were again.

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Review:

I haven’t read too many (best) friends-to-lovers, so I was excited to start this book. Plus, you all know how much I love reading books set in college, so I was pumped with this one hit my Kindle. We get to see a lot of the characters we met in the first book in the series, including Austin a few times, despite him being in New York City for the majority of the book. This book spans across the entirety of Amelie and Gannon’s (and, by default, Taya, Bevan, Callum, and Scott’s) junior year of college.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of one of the two main characters, Amelie. Although I’d first met her in the first book of the series, and liked her then, I felt like a lot of this book was her and Gannon telling us how sweet and kind she was as a person, and not really showing us aside from when she would feel guilty for not acting that way. She seemed to overreact to a lot of things that Gannon did, blowing things out of proportion and then blaming him. A big contention point of hers was that he was previously a contestant on Mrs. Right, which was basically the Bachelorette, and was the runner-up, meaning he told the girl that he was in love with her and was eventually turned down at the end of the series. I understand Amelie being upset by this, but I thought the way she acted was as if her and Gannon had been either in a relationship or situationship before he left for the show, but in reality they were just friends. Best friends, and she was in love with him, but still. Even though Gannon was aware that she had feelings for him, she never came out and told him that she liked him, so I think they both share the “blame” of not getting together sooner, or before he left for the show.

For her to be rude to him and go no-contact with him for over three months without talking anything out or really giving him an explanation why — because she didn’t have a reason to be mad unless she liked him — was unnecessarily cruel to him, and extremely childish. When they have a fight even after they get together, she throws the show in his face, along with saying things about him that aren’t true, boiling him down to choosing his career over her, being fame-obsessed, etc. I’m sympathetic to the family issues she’s going through, but whenever she’s upset she uses Gannon as her punching bag, and I didn’t think that was right. She eventually apologizes and her best friends, Taya and Bevan, make her see that she was wrong in how she treated him during the fight, but it was still irrational and mean the way she treated Gannon. She accuses him of not being supportive of her while she’s not being supportive of him, so it’s very hypocritical.

With that being said, it was extremely cool the way Gannon’s big break in acting was done. The TV series that he was auditioning for is actually a four book series that Carrie Aarons wrote and released a few years ago. The TV show titled was Rogue, and the book series was Rogue Academy — so the role that Gannon was trying out for was actually a character that has his own book! That was such a creative, interesting touch…and would probably be really trippy for those who read Just About Over You before the Rogue Academy series, since they would be viewing it through the lens that they’re essentially reading a TV show. So I guess it’s safe to say that those British football players both do and don’t live in the same cinematic universe as the Prospect Street characters.

Overall, I think this was a pretty good second book in the Prospect Street series. I was most interested in reading Amelie and Gannon’s story, so I’m happy that they were the second book. I’ll be curious to see if Bevan/Callum or if Scott is next — we know next to nothing about Scott, so I think his book should be an interesting read. Bevan’s boyfriend is just referred to as “her boyfriend” in the epilogue that takes place at their college graduation, but my money’s on it being Callum. As with all new adult books, I recommend this for 18+ due to some of the sexual content. Huge thanks to Carrie for providing me with an ARC to review!

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