A review by lindsaymck
Need Me by Tessa Bailey

emotional lighthearted tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

The forbidden romance of Honey Perribow and Professor Ben Dawson had its steamy moments, but their downfall for me was the age-gap in the teacher/student relationship. He is a 25 year old English Professor at Columbia and she is his 19 year-old pre-med student. Ben is a man who usually plays it ‘safe’ by dating older women who don’t want anything serious in an effort to do the exact opposite of his dad, a professional athlete who ruined his entire life (and that of their family) with a statutory rape case after an affair with underage girl. Honey is a country girl with big dreams in the big city for the first time. She has been deeply attracted to him all along and he eventually shares that attraction when he learns her full identity, but he messes up - pretty colossally - time after time while trying and failing to hold himself back from being so obsessed with her. She doesn’t seem to really consider how she is putting both his career and her own future in jeopardy, forgives him for every idiot move he makes, and eventually they end up mutually obsessed with one another. It is hard to fully get behind this couple who knows they are playing with fire, make stupid decisions, and risk both of their futures. 

Their official meet-cute of being locked in the dark closet together at their mutual friends’ party helps Ben realize that the beautiful student in class, the amazing writer from class, and the girl his friends are trying to set him up with are all one in the same. However, she uses this darkened space to essentially seduce him after recognizing his voice, compromising his morals and robbing him of the choice of how to handle the potential relationship between them. His strong morals are referenced here but they are pretty questionable (at best) from there on. After the closet encounter, he digs his own grave by insinuating she is using him to get a good grade, then he can’t seem to function without being near her to the point of bringing a date to their friend group’s outing and then following her to Kentucky when an accident brings her home to help on her family’s farm. He makes a total ass of himself in front of her hometown friends and ex-boyfriend as well as her parents when his most colossal f*ck-up is revealed and she gets (temporarily) kicked out of college because of his letter to the Dean that throws her under the bus to cover his own ass. On top of that, he gets the Dean to undo her expulsion with a veiled threat of blackmail. I want to think Ben is a good guy, but when it comes to her, he is nothing but irrational, violently possessive, and impatient. Honestly, it would’ve been two months before she wasn’t his student anymore! 

Maybe I would feel differently if she was a senior at Columbia or a post-grad, but her being a teenager was an un-ignorable ick when he is her professor. As a teacher myself, I don’t see this being a trope I could ever get behind. I also would’ve liked for her friends/roommates, Roxy and Abby, to be more vocal about taking things slow, being patient, and letting this relationship bloom when they are not in class together. Where were they when their friends had love-goggles on?! It’s telling that after the win-her-back grand gesture and “I love you’s” at the end, Honey doesn’t even know where Ben lives. They’re insta-love in all the wrong ways, but it will definitely not stop me from reading more from Tessa Bailey.