Review: For Real

Title:  For Real
Author: Chelsea Cameron
Publication:  November 14, 2013
Reviewed by:  Isalys
Rating:  3 Stars
Reason for Reviewing:  E-book provided in exchange for an honest review.

Two people. One fake relationship. What could go wrong?

When virgin Shannon Travers gets fed up with her friends demanding that she find a boyfriend, she enlists the help of tattooed, mohawk-rocking graphic design student Jett. He’s more than happy to play along with their Fake Relationship, including the Ten Rules of Fake Dating that control-freak Shannon comes up with. Even if he likes to violate them. Repeatedly.

But what happens when Fake Dating starts to feel… not fake anymore? Will Shannon be willing to let go and embrace the first thing in her life that’s ever felt REAL?

Poor virgin Shannon is being dragged by her friends on yet another misadventure to finally rid her of that pesky V-card that she's holding on to.  Finally fed up with the pressure being put on her, she meets and befriends Jett who agrees to "fake date" her so that she can get her friends off her back.  What starts off as a fake relationship soon turns into an easy friendship, an intense attraction, and very real love!

I liked Shannon but liked Jett much more.  She is ambitious, studious, and hard-working, but a push-over until she finally reaches her limit.  She was also a bit perplexing.  While she had the strength to pull herself away from the family that held her back, she hardly managed to stand up for herself to her "friends", and was completely oblivious to Jett's feelings.

Sweet, Asian Jett WINS!  He's attentive, considerate, and tattooed with just a touch of geekiness that made him especially sexy yet endearing.  Even though he wasn't the one telling the story, you know almost immediately that his feelings for Shannon were very real.  He was so genuine.

As for the secondary characters, the "friends", I had very mixed feelings.  Shannon's friends, while I don't think they meant to hurt Shannon, were [to be frank] kind of dicks to her.  They pressured her to do something that she wasn't ready for and then made HER feel guilty about it.  *swats with newspaper* Bad friends, bad! More than once, Shannon tried to validate her friendship with Hazel (her BFF) by commenting that she had been there for her before.  However, the author didn't expand on that so all you really got to see were the bad qualities.  Sadly, their friendship left a lot to be desired.  On the other hand, Jett's friendship with his roommate, Javier was a more complex.  A muscle-head with an obnoxious sense of humor, he's easy to brush off until you come to learn that Javier is a very loyal friend with a good heart who helped Jett when he had no one else to turn to.

Shannon & Jett's relationship, however fake they intended it to be, was playfully sweet and real.  It was hard to understand why they felt the need to fake it or why it took them so long to figure out how real it had become.  However, it was still gratifying when they learned their true feelings for each other.

Although the premise wasn't completely original, it was a simply sweet story and a nice way to spend an afternoon.