Wednesday, June 19, 2024

REVIEW: From the Top (book) by Jaqueline Snowe

From the Top is a contemporary college romance. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Cami is a college senior. She's worked hard these past few years, but now it seems like everything's falling apart. She expected to be made captain of her school's dance team, but instead that position is given to a junior. She's being temporarily moved out of the dream on-campus apartment she saved up for and into a co-ed dorm with no air conditioning. To top it all off, she also learns she's missing a couple required classes and will end up having a heavier course load than expected.

All her life, Cami has projected a certain image - she's cool, strong, and confident. She's proud of her body and her abilities, and she's used to ignoring other people's assumptions about her. However, she's recently started to realize that the assumptions made about her have negatively affected others in her life, such as her twin sister. 

Freddie is an engineering student who's had a crush on Cami for a while, but an incident a year ago taught him that girls like her don't fall for guys like him. His ex-girlfriend underscored that message by dumping him for being too boring. Now Cami's living in the dorm room next to his, and as he gets to know her better, he realizes he may have misjudged her.

My description is choppy and not very good, but I'm not really in the mood to try to fix it. Basically, both Cami and Freddie had stuff going on outside of their attraction to each other that was complicating their lives. Cami struggled with feeling alone and was prone to self-destructive behavior (drinking, partying, doing risky things, etc.) as a way of dealing with her negative emotions. Dance was the thing that grounded her, so not becoming her team's captain really shook her. Meanwhile, Freddie was applying for internships and worried about disappointing his family if he didn't intern at his uncle's company.

This was one of my purchases at the latest Book Bonanza. One of the people at her table said "nerdy guy and popular girl," and I just decided to go for it.

It took about half the book for Cami and Freddie to really grow on me. With Freddie, part of what won me over was seeing him be a genuinely nice and supportive guy even when he was feeling embarrassed or hurt. With Cami, it took seeing her do difficult things for the sake of her dance team. If you're a fan of Legally Blonde (which is referenced at least a time or two in the book), there's a really nice part where Cami's team shows their support for her that made me think of that movie and Elle's sorority sisters - the difference here was that Cami didn't realize they'd come forward and support her like that. I saw more of Happy Death Day's Tree Gelbman in Cami than Legally Blonde's Elle Woods, though.

Snowe's writing style didn't really appeal to me, but I ended up liking Cami and Freddie and the way things were handled with the dance team enough that I might take a look through her backlist and try something else with tropes I generally like.

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