Never Hollowed By The Stare

Say You’ll Be Nine – Lucy Lennox

One dilapidated cabin in need of renovation.

Two stubborn men pretending to be a couple.

Three summer months to get the job done.

Four tangled legs in only one bed.

Five cameras catching it all for YouTube.

Six hundred thousand Instagram followers.

Seven nosy family members with Opinions.

Eight thousand reasons they should never fall in love.

Nine million reasons why they will.

Say You’ll Be Nine is a standalone novel.

NINE! (♡´౪`♡)

Isaac ‘Nine’ Winshed is all kinds of adorbs and sweet and gentle and shy. He would rather be hit by a train than let someone be hurt under his watch. When he was a child he didn’t want his favorite chicken, Sir Pecks-a-lot, to be eaten so he let it live in his closet.

The man lives to help other people. He wields a hammer like Thor and has the heart of Captain America. His superpower is home renovation. He vlogs about DIY projects on Youtube. The best thing about him is that he didn’t feel too good to be true. I loved how author, Lucy Lennox, made him alive and relatable.

Nine is the ninth in a family of 12. All his life, he’s been dating girls but never really felt the spark. It wasn’t until he was with Cooper when he realized something about himself. For him, it’s not the the gender but the person. And Cooper was that person.

Cooper Heath is an aspiring actor hoping to make it big in Hollywood. He’s best friends with Eli, Nine’s big brother. Cooper was the opposite of Nine in many ways. He’s witty, extroverted, very talkative and a bit dramatic. He’s highly self-reliant and doesn’t like asking for help. He’s currently back in town, living with his mom and twin brother, Jackson.

Jacks has a rare blood disorder and they needed money for a bone marrow transplant. The fastest way was to accept a sponsorship for an LGBT-oriented DIY show on Youtube where Coop and Nine pretend to be a gay couple and renovate a cabin in the woods.

Coop can’t tell his Phillips from a Robertson but he’s very social media savvy. His superpower is Instagram. The project should be easy. All he needed to do was make them look good.

Except…how NOT to fall for the very attractive lumberjack+fake boyfriend whom you were kinda crushing on since when you were a kid? The same lumberjack+fake boyfriend who’s the younger brother of your best friend and by all accounts, straight?

Things are getting real really fast!

I want to see that time-lapse video of the cabin being renovated. As Nine said, it was like watching him and Cooper fall in love. It was fantastic to see how the characters developed and their romance transition from reel to real.

I totally loved how Nine embraced everything with an open heart and an open mind. He himself admitted he was naive but he learned fast and he gave it his all. Coop was very patient with him and they talked everything out, at first. It was wasn’t until the latter part that they headed towards that notorious miscommunication+separation route.

After which we are rewarded with a grand gesture moment that was so cute and so endearingly Nine. I wished this was a movie because that scene would be so beautiful on screen.

Cooper was no slouch either. He pulled off his own grand gesture with perfect timing with the best Christmas present ever. That ending was pure ♡ ♡ ♡ !

Say You’ll Be Nine is my first book from the author and I loved it to bits! This is a contemporary, opposite-attracts, forced proximity, fake boyfriend romance with a slight enemies-but-not-really angle thrown in. There’s also the brother’s bestfriend trope and first time gay going on. Everything came together in the best way possible.

It’s pretty much guaranteed, after reading this book, you’ll want a Nine in your life too!

Rating:
4.5 Stars – perfection is only half a step away

Soundtrack: You’ll Be Mine
Artist: Irma Kooper
Album: