The Boy on the Bridge

Pairing: M/F

Orientation: straight

Identity: Cisgender

Warning: dubious consent, bullying, child abuse

The Boy on the Bridge is Sam Mariano’s newest young adult contemporary bully romance and at just around 700 pages it’s also her longest.  I’m not a huge fan of long books; I tend to think that somewhere along the halfway mark they start to feel stale and lag.  This book, however, didn’t feel long.  I was invested in the story and the characters no matter how often I thought the main heroine was an idiot, but more on that in a bit.  Sam Mariano has written one of my favorite antiheroes in Mateo Morelli so the characters have to be exceptional for me to even like them.  The main hero, Hunter Maxwell, was extremely likeable and came off as less assholey than Carter Mahoney from Untouchable. Riley Bishop, the heroine, was just a tad too self-righteous and hypocritical, but I didn’t hate her, and for this story she was the person that Hunter needed.

Many, many years ago when I was taking a creative writing course the phrase “show don’t tell” became engraved in my psyche, and that’s exactly what Mariano did in Part One of this book.  Too often we get half-assed explanations as to why the hero holds a grudge and must destroy the heroine’s life, but in this book we get to see why Hunter is hell bent on making Riley’s life miserable.  Are his reasons just and make sense?  Not to an adult reader, but a 14 year old kid whose whole life was upended and drastically changed seemingly overnight because of Riley.  Yes.  And this is one of the main things that does differentiate this story from every other bully romance out there.  We weren’t just thrown into the present and given a lame excuse as to the hero’s behavior.  We were shown exactly why Hunter acts the way that he does, why he was angry when he was 14 and why 4 years later he still hasn’t been able to fully let go of his anger.

I liked most of the characters in this book.  I liked Riley and Hunter together as a couple, except when Riley whined about not being able to be with him because of certain actions right before she tumbled into bed with him.  I liked Riley’s mom, Michelle and her boyfriend Ray.  Not gonna lie, I kinda want to read more about Ray.  An older man with tattoos sign me up for that one.  Hunter’s mom can go eat a bag of dicks though.  My favorite character hands down is Ryden? Sherlock.  I need his story or a whole series, a la Morelli, about him.  But, like not him in high school, but an older more devious Sherlock. Yeah that would be great.

For as long as the book was, the story flowed really well.  I didn’t read it all in one sitting, but I never felt that it dragged.  There wasn’t a whole lot of plot.  It was the epitome of a relationship drama.  There was very little going on outside of Hunter and Riley building their relationship, and all the drama revolved around that.  I ain’t mad at it because if I wanted to read a complicated book that I needed to take notes on I would read high fantasy or sci-fi not a high school bully romance.  It’s not a story we haven’t read before, but few of them are, however, it was more well written than most in this genre which I truly appreciate.  I only wish that Riley had more of a backbone and actually showed it instead of just telling us about it.

But, please right older, more devious, evil, possibly bisexual Sherock’s story. (In my head Sherlock is most definitely bisexual who becomes an evil, crimal mastermind, and falls in love with the cop that is investigating his case.  I’d name him Brandon Moriarty.)

The book was requested and I was provided a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.