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Series: Spring Hill Blues #1
Publication date: August 31st, 2019
Pages: 362
Synopsis:
This isn't high school. This is a war zone.
It should be just another year for me at Spring Hill High. It's not. It's the first of many years... without my brother.
Fighting back the memories of Brady should be the most difficult thing I have to face while walking the halls of SHH. Instead, those sad reminders become the least of my worries.
My brother's best friends make sure of that.
They won't let me heal in peace. In fact, the three star football players--the ones my brother knew all his life--are determined to make me do it their way, or live through hell in the process.
What they don't understand is, I lived through my brother's death... that means I can live through anything.
Bring it, hotshots. I'm waiting.
Free Fall is a high school bully romance.
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Review:
Briar's in mourning. Her older brother has passed away and Briar doesn't know how to cope. He was the steadfast rock that kept her grounded and when that is taken away from her, she loses all drive to carry on. She stops dressing in anything more than baggy sweats, she showers sparingly, and school is now an afterthought for the once studious girl. But it seems Brady's best friends and football teammates will not let Briar sink into despair. Lex, Cade, and Reid are determined to force Briar out of the shadows of depression and back into the world of the living... whether she likes it or not.
As Briar starts to come back to her new reality without her brother, she starts to realize the depths of her feelings for Reid, the team quarterback. The bully of a man with the bitch of a cheerleader girlfriend is the last thing that Briar should desire but for some reason she can't stop herself from feeling a twinge of jealousy every time she's see them together. Little does she realize that Reid has harbored his own secrets about his feelings for Briar. However, the ghost of her brother's disproval of their union hangs heavy over Reid's head and causes him to resist pursuing the girl he really wants. Can Briar learn to live without her brother and can Reid make peace with his best friend's ghost to finally have the girl he has always wanted?
The book started in the middle of Briar's turmoil and was so abrupt that I had to double check that I was reading the first book in the series after all. It was one of those books that you have to take a running start reading because it's going to throw a lot of backstory at you all at once and you have to puzzle piece the parts together to form what happened beyond the scope of the story. While sometimes that can be a good way to exercise the brain, when running on 3-4 hours of sleep it was a lot of brain power I was lacking at the current moment.
I did feel the loss flowing off the pages. The pain was tangible and seemed to seep from every pore of every character in their world. Brady was made out to be this god tier man that made even people who didn't know him personally mourn. That seemed a bit... far-fetched. There were times when someone was warned to treat Briar right simply by mentioning Brady. This worked with their schoolmates and football teammates but when mentioning to other school's football players... sure that's unfortunate but why would they scramble to be kind to her simply for that reason? People aren't that empathetic in reality, in my opinion.
I felt like there was the potential for a reverse harem within the pages, especially with the connection between Briar and Lex as well as Briar and Reid. It almost felt like the author toyed with the idea throughout the entirety of the book. It was similar to enjoying the appetite with the potential of a delicious entree in the next book to come.
