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A review by agrippinaes
Need Me by Tessa Bailey
3.0
I enjoyed reading this, for the most part. It had a fairly standard plot, but it was well-written and engaging. I liked both main characters, but I think I liked Honey more. She was very sweet, but I loved that she could stand up for herself too. I thought they had good chemistry and some well-written sex scenes together.
One strength of the book was some genuinely funny and heartwarming moments, particularly around friends and family. I loved the backstory of, and the part where she went home I also liked Honey’s relationship with her friends back home and how protective they all remained of her.
Both Honey and Ben had fun side relationships with their respective best friends and I liked the glimpses of those friendships. Ben’s was definitely the strongest - you could feel how long they had known each other and how much they cared about each other.
Aside from the lighter stuff, I also enjoyed this novel’s take on the “small town girl moves to the big city” tropes. I thought Honey’s sense of claustrophobia around her small town upbringing was very well portrayed, and I loved that she wasn’t hateful or resentful or embarrassed of her hometown - she loved it, but she also knew she needed to leave. Bailey covered this really well. Finally, I really liked the final grovel - it was very cute.
So, whilst I mostly enjoyed this, I did have some gripes. I had some issues with the plot. I thought their relationship moved really quickly in a way that I didn’t really enjoy - I think they needed more time together
I also wasn’t keen on Ben’s backstory.
On a similar note, I really, really, really cannot stress how much I hated the use of “Lolita” as a nickname for Honey, even before he knew her real name. There was a lot, especially early on, of calling back to the novel Lolita when he thinks about her, and I just found it really off-putting. It’s not a romance novel, or a romantic story in any way, and it wasn’t sexy or cute. It just felt odd. I think a lot of work had been done by Tessa Bailey to make this, a student-teacher romance, as appropriate as it could be: whilst there’s still a power imbalance, she at least jiggled about the ages a little bit (I had wondered in the previous novel why Ben was 25 compared to his friends 27, but it made sense in this one finding out that Honey was 19, nearly 20. I actually would have preferred Honey to be older, too, but that’s not the problem here). What felt odd is to do work to make their relationship seem as appropriate as it can be whilst continuously having the man (who has the power in the relationship) thinking of his love interest in terms of a fictional victim of a paedophile. It didn’t work, I didn’t like it, and it felt massively inappropriate.
Also, some of the sex scenes had little details in I found odd and a bit jarring. Tessa Bailey is so good at sex scenes that I never thought I’d be writing this, but sometimes words would be used that sounded really juvenile and felt a bit out of place.
Obviously, I did enjoy the vast majority of this book, I just found the problems I’ve stated hard to ignore as I didn’t really understand why they had to be in there.
I would recommend it if you want a fairly well-written student-teacher romance.
Content Warnings:
One strength of the book was some genuinely funny and heartwarming moments, particularly around friends and family. I loved the backstory of
Spoiler
her little league baseball teamSpoiler
That led to some really, really great moments - some funny bits especially. Her family was so sweet. I really liked all the stuff about the infamous Perribow tractor, the scene where she and her mother watch Ben shirtless, and the part where her brother tries to threaten Ben but has to concede his legs are broken so he can’t really do much. It was nicely done.Both Honey and Ben had fun side relationships with their respective best friends and I liked the glimpses of those friendships. Ben’s was definitely the strongest - you could feel how long they had known each other and how much they cared about each other.
Aside from the lighter stuff, I also enjoyed this novel’s take on the “small town girl moves to the big city” tropes. I thought Honey’s sense of claustrophobia around her small town upbringing was very well portrayed, and I loved that she wasn’t hateful or resentful or embarrassed of her hometown - she loved it, but she also knew she needed to leave. Bailey covered this really well. Finally, I really liked the final grovel - it was very cute.
So, whilst I mostly enjoyed this, I did have some gripes. I had some issues with the plot. I thought their relationship moved really quickly in a way that I didn’t really enjoy - I think they needed more time together
Spoiler
especially before any joking about marriage that we got later on.I also wasn’t keen on Ben’s backstory.
Spoiler
I really don’t think that the plot needed the extra angst of that storyline, involving his father having committed statutory rape. I think it’s reasonable that Ben, as a young professor, would be wary of a student who is attracted to him - I don’t think it needed the extra worry caused by his father’s past actions to make him write the letter to the Dean, and so on. Also - I really didn’t like the way the statutory rape was actually portrayed: having the girl in question be confirmed as a liar and have gone to the police in some kind of retribution against Ben’s father. It felt wildly inappropriate to sort of excuse his father’s actions with the caveat that the girl was a liar. It was pretty much playing into the ‘misconception’ that a lot of crimes like this happen because the victim, whoever they are, has in some way asked for it, or exaggerated, or lied, and that they’re in some way behaving maliciously in reporting the crime. This really didn’t work for me in what was otherwise a lighthearted storyline. I don’t think this backstory needed to be in it at all, but I really think it was particularly egregious to portray a statutory rape storyline where most of the blame felt shifted firmly onto the teenage girl, not the adult man who slept with her.On a similar note, I really, really, really cannot stress how much I hated the use of “Lolita” as a nickname for Honey, even before he knew her real name. There was a lot, especially early on, of calling back to the novel Lolita when he thinks about her, and I just found it really off-putting. It’s not a romance novel, or a romantic story in any way, and it wasn’t sexy or cute. It just felt odd. I think a lot of work had been done by Tessa Bailey to make this, a student-teacher romance, as appropriate as it could be: whilst there’s still a power imbalance, she at least jiggled about the ages a little bit (I had wondered in the previous novel why Ben was 25 compared to his friends 27, but it made sense in this one finding out that Honey was 19, nearly 20. I actually would have preferred Honey to be older, too, but that’s not the problem here). What felt odd is to do work to make their relationship seem as appropriate as it can be whilst continuously having the man (who has the power in the relationship) thinking of his love interest in terms of a fictional victim of a paedophile. It didn’t work, I didn’t like it, and it felt massively inappropriate.
Also, some of the sex scenes had little details in I found odd and a bit jarring. Tessa Bailey is so good at sex scenes that I never thought I’d be writing this, but sometimes words would be used that sounded really juvenile and felt a bit out of place.
Obviously, I did enjoy the vast majority of this book, I just found the problems I’ve stated hard to ignore as I didn’t really understand why they had to be in there.
I would recommend it if you want a fairly well-written student-teacher romance.
Content Warnings: