✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4.5 ⭐️ Review: Roxie Noir’s The One Month Boyfriend, book 1 of her new Wildwood Society series ✍🏻

Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️

“I felt like you wanted to cut me to pieces and I wanted to let you do it.”

Roxie Noir’s The One Month Boyfriend is unexpected. In hindsight, this is ridiculous because The Hook Up Equation invites speculation about Silas and Kat’s story. You’re probably saying, “ but wait, Professor A, don’t you mean Break The Rules, June and Levi’s book?” Well, maybe, but for me, if I think back to the Loveless Brothers’ stories and consider which one portends the situation of Silas and Kat’s romance in Noir’s newest book, it would be The Hook Up Equation that sets a stage for the depth of emotion found in The One Month Boyfriend. None of this, obviously, has told you a thing about this newest book from Roxie Noir, and honestly, I feel as though this book will be sitting in my mind far into the future as I process its layers. 

Where to begin to tell you why this book is much more than you can ever know it to be? 

For one, Noir’s style is so darn impressive in this book. There are many instances of beautiful sentences crafted carefully to help us better understand Kat and Silas. This is the type of writing that, as you turn the page and fall upon one of these beautifully carved sentences, you find goosebumps on your arms. This is the type of book that earns that notification from Goodreads about “so and so posted their highlights.” Roxie Noir has created a story here that is, I imagine, difficult to find the words for, so she had to use images to do so, and she does it so very, very well. 

This story is about mental health. As someone walking in the shadows of her 21-year-old son’s mental health battle and the mines associated with it, there were moments in the story that felt so real. While I can empathize, and I believe Noir has told Silas and Kat’s stories in such a way that you can understand their trials more easily, I can only imagine the difficulty in doing so, but I believe Noir has done this beautifully. She did not take it easy on Silas and Kat. In fact, much of their story is about them navigating those mines I referred to previously. And honestly, this can feel frustrating for a romance reader who simply wants to escape into a story where a hero and heroine fall madly in love, have $ex, fall more deeply in love, and live a happy ending with a wedding and 2.5 children after that. But that isn’t this type of romance. Don’t get me wrong. There is a power in the love between Silas and Kat, and it’s beautiful and messy as well. There is an underlying idea here that the deepest of loves allows us to love the imperfections in the other. Roxie Noir doesn’t hold back in that message as she piles life on her main characters, yet she offers them a happy ending that matches the character of their relationship and it seems poetic to this reader. 

There were moments in The One Month Boyfriend that felt disjointed. Normally, I would call that a negative, but honestly, it seemed intentional to me. I’d like to think that Noir used this as a way to underscore the challenges in Silas and Kat’s lives. I’d like to believe that this is her genius, and I’m fairly certain I’m right. If you’re like me, and you’re always looking for a romance story that is just “more,’ then you should buy The One Month Boyfriend. I believe you’ll find a story about the resilience and fortitude of love in the face of our imperfections. 

In love and romance,

Professor A