Because of Low - Abbi Glines (Sea Breeze #2)

OMG, what a cheesy cover.  XD  The expression that guy's face just makes me want to cackle with laughter.  Okay, moving on now.

Because of Low was my pick for the "A college romance" category of the Unapologetic Romance Readers 2017 Reading Challenge.  It's the second in the Sea Breeze series, and the main character, Marcus Hardy, was apparently a side character in the first book.  However, you definitely don't need to have read that first book in order to read this one.  While the couple from the first book appear here, there's nothing you can't really intuit about what happened.  The plot of this one is about Marcus and Willow, aka Low.  Marcus has moved back to Sea Breeze from Tuscaloosa to deal with family troubles, mainly that his father has been having an affair with devastating effects on Marcus' mother and sister.  He moves in with the friend of a friend, Cage, who happens to be the best friend of Willow, who basically lives with Cage, even sleeping in his bed, because she doesn't have a home of her own since her sister kicked her out.  Cage swears he's going to marry Willow, even though there's no romantic relationship between them, and Marcus is immediately attracted to her as well.

The "big reveal" of this book isn't really as such, because its' pretty apparent from the beginning what's going on, and when you factor in that the very first page of the book has Marcus saying he has to choose between his family and Willow...well, there's only one reason for that, now isn't there?  But overall, this was a light and cute romance.  The timeline seems a little funky, sometimes seeming like it's taking place over a few days and sometimes over the course of weeks.  Additionally, while both the characters are in college and are taking classes (Willow at a community college, Marcus online) there's not really a "college" vibe here, but I guess it technically counts.  However, I honestly found Willow and Marcus to be very bland characters.  You can see the protagonists of future books lining up on the sidelines here, and honestly I feel like they had more potential than these main characters.  While Marucs and Willow are both very good people who care for each other, their friends, their families...they kind of have the type of lives you'd want to live (family drama excepted, but that's not them, that's their families) not the ones you really want to read about.

So, yeah. This was good, and light, and fast; a decent summer read, even though it doesn't take place in summer.  But it wasn't anything electric or riveting.  I might check out the other books in the series since I do think this was a character thing rather than something to do with the writing or plotting, but they won't be immediately at the top of my priority list.

3 stars out of 5.