Over the Hood

Rating 3 out of 5

Spice Factor 2.5 maybe 3

Potential Trigger Warnings: fat phobia, eating disorder, alcoholism, grief, cancer and death of a parent.

This one is expected to release this October 12th. Bonnie Cassidy, the female main character, runs her own online business as a dietitian. She has a fairly nice life with her fiancee Christopher. That is until she walks in on Christopher with another woman. In what we soon learn is pure Bonnie self-confidence and knowledge of her worth, she quickly leaves him. Bonnie returns home and decides to stay with her dad, who owns a mechanic shop, until the can decide her next move. She quickly encounters the standoffish overtly grumpy mechanic Alejandro, who has a host of things he is also working through.

Alejandro cannot stand Bonnie feeling that she talks too much and is too loud. He sees her as a disruption to the peace he has found in his life and job. A problem that becomes more evident to him, when she begins to encroach on his personal space. Alejandro lives in the second apartment above the shop which shares a common area with Bonnie and her father. Bonnie's father has given all his employees one rule: HIS DAUGHTER IS OFF-LIMITS. However, soon Alejandro finds himself struggling to follow this rule.

This book is a cute and quick read and once the spice arrives it is there to stay. I enjoyed the dual POV because it enabled you to see the development of this relationship from both sides, and I don't think you could truly appreciate it without that. The book has some pretty obvious plot points, which you can tell are coming based on the way things are written. Like say you didn't read the summary, it would take all of 5 seconds to figure out she is going to walk in on Christopher cheating. However, it is still a cute story. Bonnie is a character who you can't help but want to be like. She is confident, successful, knows her worth, knows what she wants and deserves. We should all be like Bonnie for real. I think my biggest issue with this book was that it brings in some very heavy topics for them to be minor plot issues that I don't necessarily think are handled as thoroughly as they could have been.