Professor Romance

Overall Grade: B

Tropes: forbidden; enemy’s little sister; best friend’s brother; opposites attract; small-town; soccer; breeding kink

I read early reviews of Saffron A. Kent’s You Beautiful Thing, You to get a sense of what early readers have said. Goodreads is such a fraught place, however. Many of her early readers love Tempest and Ledger, the main characters of this newest story. We’ve met them before in other St. Mary’s Rebels stories, and SAK piqued our curiosity about this couple, in particular. But the toxic side of Goodreads exists in the reviews for You Beautiful Thing, You too. There were a handful of reviews who DNF’d it for the things that make SAK’s romances purely her, and that troubles this reviewer.

Saffron A. Kent has a particular voice, a particular version of romance. There is intent in her authorial choices: fraught hero, almost an anti-hero; nubile FMC who seems both naive yet mature in equal measure; a fated love that transcends time and space; and an almost stream-of-consciousness narration that, oftentimes, weighs down her story. If you’re not adept at recognizing her stylistic choices, you will reduce her storytelling to particular scenes that seem farfetched and absurd, but that’s also SAK’s intent. She writes romance strewn with smut, and it’s titillating. Even more, SAK has created a niche for herself in romancelandia, and she deserves that spot. You Beautiful Thing, You underscores the ineptitude of the people closest to you to truly understand what makes you, you. This message is powerful for people who feel unseen and unheard. This is Ledger’s plight, and Tempest, his forever love, understands him better than his own family. She sees him and understands him in ways that they don’t realize until she champions him.  In her moments of helping his family realize the truths of Ledger, you fall madly in love with her character. In return, Ledger is her protection, her safe place. She grew up in a home with horrible parents, and her older brother, Reed, was her former protector. However, Reed’s life is now wrapped up in Callie and their child, so Tempest is alone except for Ledger as her protector.

There is much back and forth between Ledger and Tempest as they deny a future as a couple. As they negotiate that tension, SAK loses readers because they don’t understand the gravity of SAK’s story for Ledger and Tempest. How can Ledger love Tempest when Ledger has never learned to accept and love himself? It would be foolhardy to have him profess his undying love for her. Instead, he must struggle and strain between actions that show his love and the words to match it. I appreciated that Tempest and Ledger have a largely physical relationship with a want to create their own family before they can voice their unending love for each other. Their story must take up much of the 464 pages of this book because they have to dig through years of traumatic sludge, and SAK gives them that space. 

Beyond the foundation of their emotional journeys, Saffron A. Kent’s You Beautiful Thing, You is pure, unadulterated smut. It’s dreamy and decadently dirty. To get caught up in the appropriateness of their eroticism is to miss the point. It’s possible to craft both an angsty romance and a smutty one too. It’s what romancelandia allows. And that’s why I’ll continue to read Saffron A. Kent because she can be both things: scintillating and spicy in equal measure.

In love and romance,

Professor A