Reviews

✍🏻 Professor Romance’s 4 ⭐️ Review: K.A. Tucker’s The Hustler Next Door ✍🏻

Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Tropes: Enemies to lovers; small town romance; quirky, headstrong, independent FMC; big city developer MMC

“I wouldn’t ever want you to mute yourself for anyone, especially not me.”

Justine’s journey in K.A. Tucker’s The Hustler Next Door is pure magic. I speak mostly to her developmental sojourn as this romance is strictly her point of view as she encounters her ex-, Bill, and Garrett, the one who adds sparks to her life. Through her characterization, K.A. Tucker illustrates the oft-used line: “well-behaved women rarely make history.” Justine does not ascribe to the social norms of her community. She loves what she loves, and she doesn’t apologize for it. Unless she’s cheated on and told she isn’t marriageable material. In the shadow of her ex’s infidelity and insensitivity, Justine questions her likability, and this becomes the most real portion of Tucker’s romance. It’s where she captures me emotionally because all of us, at one time or another, have lost people or forgone relationships because others struggled to accept us as we are. To be seen and accepted by the people in our life is an important part of being human. 

Justine’s character becomes a composite of personal slights and powerful independence. She knows herself until she’s questioned, and she simply wants to be loved and accepted. Her friendship with Scarlet, the heroine of Tucker’s The Player Next Door, sets the bar for the romantic relationship Justine deserves. Scarlet accepts Justine as she is and loves her completely (in friendship only). When Justine meets Garrett, Tucker crafts a combustible enemies-to-lovers storyline for them. One of my admonishments of this story is the inconsistency of their chemistry. I think that has more to do with the one-person point of view of the story. Had we access to Garrett’s internal thoughts, we might feel their chemistry more decisively. Instead, as Garrett comes and goes in the story, the fluidity of their attraction ebbs and flows as well. It moves from disdain to fire and $ex in mere pages. I would have loved to see that grow from sparks to blaze more deliberately through the scope of both of their points of view. 

However, Tucker ends her story in a way that marries Garrett and Justine’s attraction with Garrett’s sweet exhortation of acceptance. It leaves the reader replete, knowing that their happy-for-now will eventually become the happy ending that both of them deserve. 

K.A. Tucker is a deft storyteller, and she reminds us that we are worthy of being loved without needing to change or be someone else in her newest book, The Hustler Next Door. She suggests that there is someone out there, whether it’s a best friend or significant other, who we should expect to accept us just as we are (a very Bridget Jones sentiment).

In love and romance,

Professor A