A review by armontheroad
Harmony by London Price

• Loveable characters? It's complicated

3.0

I received an E-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

If you follow my page, you probably are aware that I *loved* the first book in this companion series, ACOUSTICS. So I was unbelievably excited when I got access to an Advanced Readers Copy of HARMONY. I read this back in March, before the release date, but wasn’t able to accurately put my thoughts together until now. 

To be quite honest, HARMONY just did not work for me. I rarely read a synopsis before I pick up a book- which is entirely an issue on me and not the author or the book itself- but if I had looked into the synopsis beforehand, I would have known that this has two of my LEAST favorite tropes! I do not think age gaps and teacher/student relationships are done well 98% of the time. They just give me major ick. With that as the foundation of the story, it was extremely difficult for me to care about these two people together. 

Not to forget, the sex scenes in this book were hard for me to read. With my background, if sex scenes in books have even the slightest hint of hostility (not in a consenting power-dynamic way), I cannot get onboard. There is a scene in this book where Hillary is having sex in a bathroom. Her mind starts to wonder because she has ADHD. Instead of Glenn stopping to see if she is okay or if they should stop, this is what happens:

Glenn slaps my ass, and I look up sharply.

“Hey!”

“Hey, what?” they grunt. “I’m doing great work back here, and you went somewhere else inside your head.”

This scene is supposed to be light-hearted and fun, I think. However, it rubbed me the wrong way. This isn’t the only time something icky happens during sex scenes in this book, if memory serves me well, which made the reading experience just that much more uncomfortable for me.

HARMONY is not a bad book by any means. I’ll still happily recommend it to people whom I think would enjoy it. If you like age gap romances, teacher/student dynamics, nonbinary love interests, and ADHD rep in a heroine, I think this could be for you. I did like the ADHD rep in this!! I loved we get a nonbinary character who isn’t a small skinny androgenous femme-perceived person. Also, seeing the boys from the first book pop in throughout HARMONY was so much fun because I utterly adore them!! Overall, I think this was a three-star rating. There was nothing horrendously bad about it but there wasn’t a whole like that I enjoyed. I look forward to reading more from London Price!!