This book was a pretty normal romance, it wasn't anything special. Pretty much every single trope that could be added, was, and while that's not a bad thing, it made this super predictable. I knew who Macy was going to end up with as soon as he was introduced, so this was mainly a waiting game.
The Bad Boy and the Tomboy follows Macy, a high school senior on the boys soccer team who is exploring romance for the first time. She bumps in the brown haired, green eyed, bad boy who complicates things endlessly.
Macy playing soccer was a big thing in the blurb, so I was really hoping that it would play a bigger part in the book. As someone who's involved in sports, I know the stress of pre-game, and I know the disappointment of loss. I wish we would've seen more of that, not just Macy and Sam playing together.
Like I said earlier, this was super tropey. First off, we have the enemies-to-lovers bad boy trope. Of course, Sam had a hidden soft side, and his reason for using people was tragic. Next, we had the choosing between brothers trope, or in this case, cousins. I really hated that. It always just seems to add unnecessary drama.
Macy was also a total "not like other girls" character. According to the blurb, she hates all other girls, except for her friend Jasmine. That already kind of threw me off. She also plays soccer on the boys team, (which I guess did make sense because there wasn't a girls team) and is mainly friends with guys. While this wasn't stated every other sentence like it is in other books, it was a bit irritating.
Despite all of my critiques, I was happy that this book didn't completely alienate Macy. She actually had a strong friend group, and while most of them were pretty one dimensional, it was a welcome change from other romances.
Part of the reason I found this to be just alright is that I'm normally not a romance reader. It needs to be pretty great to catch my attention and keep it, and this book just struggled a bit with that. I can definitely see why someone would love this, it just wasn't my type of book.
Thanks to Netgalley and the author for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review