DNF Review: The Peer and the Pupper

Title: The Peer and the Puppet 
Series: When Rivals Play #1 
Author: B.B. Reid 
Genre: New Adult, Romance, Contemporary
Publisher: Bebe's Reads LLC
Publication Date: July 22, 2018 
Source: Bought 

THE PUPPET
Borrow the bike. Win the race. Collect the cash. It should've been an easy job. Ran out of town with a broken leg and a lawsuit, my mother's latest flame swoops in like a knight in gilded armor. Blackwood Keep is a place I don't belong, and I'm not the only one who knows. To the boy across the hall, my savior's only son, I'm a stray looking for a bone.
He's lord of the manor.
King of the academy.
And number one on my shit list.
THE PEER
I have no intentions of becoming a happy family with the social climber and her wild daughter. A bottle of Jameson and a cracked skull gets my problem shipped to reform school, but I didn't bank on her returning.
Four's out to get even, and she almost had the perfect plan: expose the privileged kid moonlighting as a gangbanger. She's smart, but she'll have to be smarter. Sending her away won't be good enough this time. I'm going to have to tame the little troublemaker. To the girl across the hall, the one without a name, I'm nothing without my silver spoon.
She's lady of the trailer park.
Queen of the swamps.
And my new favorite pastime.

Goodreads | Amazon 

Well, this book was a mess. 

Honestly, I wanted so badly to love this one. It sounded right up my alley -- enemies to lovers, a strong female protagonist, and the two main characters are thrown together! I mean, that's a recipe for an entertaining read. Unfortunately, this one turned from entertaining to infuriating pretty soon after I started it. There was just so much going on that it annoyed me. It felt like the author couldn't quite balance all the different plot lines and it left me feeling confused and irritated while I was reading. I ended up DNFing it at 77%. 

Okay, so I straight up couldn't stand the main characters. First of all, their names. The girl was named Four, the boy named Ever. 

Four. Ever. 

. . . Yeah. 

They were also just both very annoying. I didn't get what was Ever's problem?? Like, I get that the author was going for the irresistible, bad-boy, jerk hero we so often see in books like this but it absolutely didn't work. Ever had the personality of a saltine cracker and all the "dangerous" things about him made me think he was just dumb. I really do hate feeling this way but I just couldn't find it in me to root for him or even like him. I didn't enjoy reading about him and it just made me sad for Four, honestly. I hated that she even gave him the time of day. He didn't treat her well at all, even in the moments when he was supposed to be like a "nice guy" but Four fell for it and it just . . . ugh. It was so frustrating. She really didn't turn out to be the strong female character I thought she would be which was sad. 

Like I previously said, the plot was really disjointed and all over the place.  It was going in too many different directions and it made it hard to follow and feel connected to the characters. What made it even harder was the fact that the author just didn't explain anything. Like, I get not wanting to spoon-feed your readers information but it got to the point that the author was keeping things so vague that I was left feeling stupid, like I was missing something I should have got but the information just wasn't there. 

I could honestly keep going on but I don't want to. In all, this book just wasn't for me. None of the elements in it sparked my interest (like I said, many of them ignited my annoyance). If you've been a fan of this author's previous work, you may have more luck with this one than I did. 

“You are the karma I deserve.” 

One out of Five Teapots