Hey there, bookworms and happy Friday to you! I hope your weekend is ready to go with a stack of books and new worlds/characters for you to meet! This is my last weekend of freedom before I start the new job and while I’m nervous about being the new kid on the block, I’m excited to do something that has to do a little bit with what I went to school to study. It’s a new adventure and I think I’m ready to go.
Anyway, before work takes priority and while I wait on some Chinese food, I thought I’d bring you a book review. Don’t hate me, but tonight’s story is a book I read almost two months ago, that I’ve had hidden in the piles taking over my bookshelves for even longer. Let’s talk about Dear Professor by Blaire Drake.
Professor is the first book I’ve read by Drake, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I have a thing for these studious, stuffy, brooding academic types (if you know me, you know all about my obsession with Gabriel Emerson from the Gabriel’s Inferno series.. I’ve discussed it here on the blog) so once I read the summary of this book, I hit that one-click on Amazon to get my copy.
Darcy Hamilton is just trying to get through school on her own. Paying her way to get her Law Degree, she leads a risque double life outside the classroom as a cam girl. Her profession pays the tuition but causes her not to become attached… to anyone.
Professor Keaton is not one to be trifled with, in class or out of it. To say he’s strict is a total understatement. Darcy does her best to remain under the radar on campus mostly due to her online persona, but when she finds herself in need of a letter of recommendation for her law school dream, she needs to suck it up and make herself known to her dark and mysterious professor and ask him for that favor.
What Darcy doesn’t know is that Professor Jordan Keaton knows exactly who she is, and when she comes to him seeking her letter, he has his own proposition, one that’s far more… erotic.
Jordan has been watching and commanding Darcy regularly during her show. He decides that in exchange for her letter, he wants her all to himself, and to bend to his every demand for the rest of the semester. If she doesn’t comply, he’ll be forced to reveal her secret life and destroy her future.
This was a tough book for me to rate.. and to love. In a time of #MeToo and keeping women submissive and silent, I didn’t want to get on board with Jordan Keaton’s actions when it came to Darcy. I didn’t, but instead, I kept reading to see that she had all the power. Her power of seduction and even defiance kept Keaton in a vice for a good chunk of this book. The more the two resist each other and their demands, the more their desires were fueled to create something new and a deeper connection. Darcy cracked through Jordan’s tough as nails exterior while he collided with and broke down her lack of attachment to intimacy and the idea of a relationship.
The main reason this book was hard to get on board with in the beginning is because usually the “book boyfriend” serving as center stage has some sort of redeemable quality to him. Jordan was straightforward, demanding, and sexy, but he came off as cold and disconnected which caused me to become slightly perturbed and put off by him. His transformation was there, I knew, but it was slow to come around. I kept reading to see how Darcy would handle him, because I knew she would.
In the end, I liked these characters and the overall storyline with the whole student/teacher dynamic, but because I was made to feel standoffish in the beginning, I couldn’t fully immerse myself in the pages and instead, kept these two at a safe distance. There was too much of a gray area surrounding how their agreement, words, and actions could be misconstrued and seen as something it wasn’t.
My Final Rating: three out of five stars
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