To Professor With Love (Forbidden Men, #2), by Linda Kage
I'm excited to be part of
Tasty Book Tours blog tour for Linda's latest, the second in her "Forbidden Men" New Adult series (The first book in the series, The Price of a Kiss, is about a girl who falls in love with a gigolo. Sounds bad, right, but, well it's a long, crazy story ...) This is a standalone, with some recurring characters from Book 1 making an appearance, but it doesn't require one to have read TPOK. Add it to your
Goodreads tbr here, but don't deny yourself the pleasure for too long, it's that sweet of a read!
Synopsis
Junior in college. Star athlete. Constant attention from the opposite sex.
On this campus, I’m worshiped. While seven hundred miles away, back in my hometown, I’m still trailer park trash, child of the town tramp, and older sibling to three kids who are counting on me to keep my shit together so I can take them away from the same crappy life I grew up in.
These two opposing sides of myself never mix until one person gets a glimpse of the true me. I never expected to connect with anyone like this or want more beyond one night. This may be the real deal.
Problem is, Dr. Kavanagh’s my literature professor.
If I start anything with a teacher and we’re caught together, I might as well kiss my entire future goodbye, as well as my family’s, and especially Dr. Kavanagh’s. Except sometimes love is worth risking everything. Or at least, it damn well better be because I can only resist so much.
Fred's Notes
I've read a few of Linda's many books (girl is a boss, seriously!), including The Stillburrow Crush, Delinquent Daddy, and Kiss It Better, and I've loved them all. They are different in genre and approach ( Stillburrow is YA, Delinquent Daddy is contemporary romance, and Kiss It Better is, idk, kind of a contemp issues book?), but they share Linda's unique ability to take a situation that seems to have been saturated with treatment by others, and make it fresh and unputdownable (I've read all of Linda's books except To Professor in one sitting, and would have read this one that way, but it's a big ass book, 358 kindle pages, whoa!). So this one too, is a situation, teacher/student, that has been the subject of several of my favorite books of the last couple years (I have a rule that I don't mention other authors in reviews, but they are familiar books), and I kind of thought, oh I know the whole plot already. But, haha, Linda laughs (I imagine), no you don't! First, the "Professor" is the girl here, although she's young, so she's the one with the authority position, and the most to lose upon discovery. Linda brings the intensity, the drama and the angst in this one, with some of the sensitive themes and issues she's touched on in other books (including rape and a whole lotta preggo goin' on), misunderstandings and miscontrued conversations up the wazoo. In other words, everything I love about a Linda Kage book. Another thing I really enjoyed about this book was the way Linda uses literary works such as The Heart of Darkness,The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter to move the plot forward, as well as to illuminate and allusively embroider the book's themes. All in all a satisfying, sweet and surprisingly affecting read (although you think I'd be on to Linda's tricks by now!), that I heartily recommend to lovers of contemporary NA.
Who's That Girl?
Linda grew up on a dairy farm in the Midwest as the youngest of eight children. Now she lives in Kansas with her husband, toddler daughter, and their nine cuckoo clocks. She works a day job in the acquisitions department of a university library and feels her life has been blessed with lots of people to learn from and love. Writing's always been a major part her world, and she's thrilled to finally share some of her stories with other romance lovers.
An Excerpt from To Professor, With Love
“What the does that even mean?”
Dr. Kavanagh remained cool and collected, damn her, seated in her chair as she calmly watched me unravel into a hot pile of anxiety. “It means you didn’t do what you were asked to do. I wanted you to
make a correlation between a character in the story and yourself. You made no such connection. In fact, you didn’t talk about you at all.”
I snorted. “Maybe I didn’t feel a connection with a bunch of rich-ass idiots from the twenties, whining about lost love while they spread around adultery like it was some kind of candy. How am I supposed to correlate anything when there is nothing to correlate?”
She fell back in her chair and sent me a frustrated frown. “Mr. Gamble…” With another sigh, she shook her head and ran her hands wearily over her face, which unfortunately made me focus on her lips.
God damn, that mouth should not be legal. I could picture it pursed so perfectly around my cock, could almost feel the wet slide of her tongue running up my entire length as she sucked me in deep.
Shit, now I had wood.
Fortunately oblivious to my crude, unwanted thoughts, she stiffened her shoulders, sat forward again and looked me straight in the eye. “Truly talented literature is truly talented for a reason. It always—always—finds a way to reach every person who reads it. It takes a theme about the human condition and makes it its little bitch.”
My eyebrows shot up into my hairline. What the hell? Shaking my head, I blinked. “Did you just say—”
“Yes!” she snapped. “I did. Because it’s true. Take one word about feelings or emotions and you’ll be able to find a theme for it in The Great Gatsby. I promise you.” When I did nothing but gape at her, she arched a curious brow. “You do have emotions, don’t you?”
“I’m having some right now.” And they were totally freaking me out, but fuck, I really liked watching her perfect, too-pure mouth forming dirty words. It was like some awful, humiliating sickness. I wanted her to do it again.
Say bitch again. Please. Just one more time."
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