REVIEW: Rebel by Kim Linwood

Rebel: A Stepbrother Romance by Kim Linwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Book Description: 

I married my stepbrother.

Yeah, no one’s more surprised than me. I can’t fucking stand him.

All I wanted was a quiet summer before starting college. Catch up on my books. Maybe get a summer job. Then he dropped into my life.

His name’s Gavin Caldwell, and he’s stupidly rich. Cocky. Arrogant. Ridiculously, panty-meltingly hot.

And he’s parading around our bridal suite shirtless. Pantless.

He has no freaking shame, and I have to pretend to be in love with him.

I hate him.

So why can’t I stop thinking about him?

This book didn’t start off in a great way for me. I didn’t like Gavin and didn’t feel any real connection or attraction between Gavin and Angie. But once things got going in the story, the connection shined through and things got good.

While this is called a “stepbrother” romance, the reality is, they weren’t actually stepsiblings. Yes, their parents were dating, engaged even, but majority of the story took place prior to their parents getting married.

There were a couple things that made this book unique in the stepbrother romance world. One was the setting of the story, the characters being on a cruise, in each other’s company and hot having to sneak around under the noses of their parents. I actually enjoyed this. They were in a confined space, spending time together, getting to know each other and things developed from there. The second unique thing about this book is that while they didn’t tell everyone of their attraction immediately upon feeling it, they also didn’t really hide it. By that I mean, there’s something that happened on the cruise (more on that later) and both Gavin and Angie ended up telling their parents about it within days of that happening and both his dad and her mom were ok with them being together as a couple. That was refreshing. There wasn’t any anger or disgust by the parents.

As for the thing on the cruise…I won’t tell you exactly what it is but I will say that I totally called it. As soon as they were told there was something special planned, I died laughing with an “OMG” moment. I kept expecting either Gavin or Angie to put the pieces together but neither did. And their reactions when they FINALLY figured it out was priceless.

Overall, I did enjoy this book. I would definitely recommend this to people :)

*I received an arc of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review*