“Clear off a top spot on your Best of 2020 list.
Playing with Fire is coming in HOT!”
--Harloe Rae, USA Today bestselling author
Book Blurb:
A broken boy on the path to destruction.
A scarred girl without direction.
A love story carved in secrets, inked with pain and sealed with a lie.
Grace Shaw and West St. Claire are arctic opposites.
She is the strange girl from the food truck.
He is the mysterious underground fighter who stormed into her sleepy Texan college town on his motorcycle one day, and has been wreaking havoc since.
She is invisible to the world.
He is the town’s beloved bad boy.
She is a reject.
He is trouble.
When West thrusts himself into Grace’s quiet life, she scrambles to figure out if he is her happily-ever-after or tragic ending.
But the harder she pushes him away, the more he pulls her out of her shell.
Grace doesn’t know much about anything beyond her town’s limits, but she does know this:
She is falling in love with the hottest guy in Sheridan U.
And when you play with fire—you ought to get burned.
If you follow LJ Shen on social media you’ll have heard talk of this book for a while, but it’s been shrouded in mystery. Once the cover and blurb were revealed, I knew that this story would be great. I’m a huge fan of all her other books, but this one is my favorite. By far. It has the same feel as her other books, but it felt more real because the characters were flawed and more relatable due to their status (or lack thereof). I was over the moon when I found out I would be getting an ARC.
I devoured this book in one sitting. Once I started, I was unable to put it down. I needed to see them get their happy ending; they deserved it so much. Playing with Fire is about West & Grace and their journey to rise out of the ashes and be reborn like a phoenix. Connected through tragedy, they both wear a suit of armor to protect themselves. Grace’s is thick makeup, hoodies and ball caps while West pushes everyone away while barely surviving and doesn’t plan further than what he’s eating for dinner that night. The attraction between the two of them was instantaneous, but it took months of friendship before Grace believed West actually thought she was beautiful. I loved watching them both assist each other in rising from the ashes and healing from past trauma. Faced with issue after issue, their journey to happily ever after was fought after tooth and nail.
“Nobody warned me what was going to happen when the phoenix finally burst up from the ashes, ridding its glorious, red-tipped wings of the heavy dust. That there would be other monsters and creatures to fight along the way. That despite having its freedom, there were still battles ahead. And that all of them would be bloody.“
The emotions in this book were so vivid that I couldn’t help feeling every bit of them; grief, guilt, shame, sadness, betrayal, joy, happiness and love. I especially loved that Grace wasn’t your typical perfect heroine, but she was still the type of take no prisoner heroine we all have come to expect. Just another thing that made this story extraordinary. I also found myself laughing out loud many times throughout the book, especially in the beginning. Moral of the story, I 100% recommended reading this story.
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