Review: "Girl Abroad" by Elle Kennedy

Girl Abroad by Elle Kennedy
Published February 2024 via Bloom Books
★★★

You know the drill: very average girl lands in London to spend a year abroad, having reassured her overprotective father that her flatmates are all nice-sounding girls…only to find that said flatmates are boys. And hot boys, at that! And one of them makes her feel tingly! Not to mention the Bad Boy, Not a Flatmate but Has a Motorcycle, who also makes her feel all tingly…and the older guy, a rando member of the aristocracy, who wants to introduce her to his high-flying way of life. What’s a girl to do?

Date all of them, naturally. While telling her father that yes, yes, her flatmates are all nice girls! And she’s not boinking any of them. Definitely not.

Now, I’m not sure if this counts as a reverse-harem book or just some sort of wish fulfillment (I’m far more familiar with the latter than with the former). Audience-wise, it’s more new adult than anything, but I don’t have (or want) a Goodreads shelf for that, so…let’s call it romance. Think normcore heroine who inexplicably has (almost) every boy she meets falling at her feet; think romantic options that are conveniently simplified to Boy Next Door (translation: hot, nice, has an accent), Bad Boy (translation: hot, has a motorcycle, likes Netflix and Chill), and Badder Boy (translation: hot, rich, not-so-secretly sleazy). The configuration of love interests is careful; it's not an accident that Abbey has the hots for one flatmate and one and a half non-flatmates (or that the flatmate who sleeps with anything that moves is the only straight man in the story to not fall head over heels for her), because that limits the amount of bad vibes between flatmates when she eventually has to choose. (I did find it odd that, in a book with a fair amount of boinking—new adult and all that—we see more boinking with the guy she doesn't end up with than with the guy she does end up with. Not that it matters, just...seems a bit odd.)

I liked the side-plot mystery—the resolution was convoluted at best, but it was a nice little bit of interest between boy dramas. But...it's not really enough to keep Abbey from relying on her father's rock-star stories to be interesting to other people (usually immediately after swearing that she won't tell people who her famous father is), and not really enough to keep the book focused on anything other than romantic drama. Obviously it's meant to be heavily about romantic drama, so that will work well for many. I think I was just looking for a bit more depth for all the characters...and I wouldn't have been sorry if romance had been scuppered entirely and the focus had been on random historical mysteries.