~ Audiobook Review: The Replacement Crush (Crush #1) ~

Author: Lisa Brown Roberts

Narrator: Emily Lawrence

True love can’t be strategized.

After book blogger Vivian Galdi’s longtime crush pretends their secret summer kissing sessions never happened, Vivian creates a list of safe crushes, determined to protect her heart.

But nerd-hot Dallas, the sweet new guy in town, sends the mission and Vivian’s zing meter into chaos. While designing software for the bookstore where Vivian works, Dallas wages a counter-mission.

Operation Replacement Crush is in full effect. And Dallas is determined to take her heart off the shelf.

The Replacement Crush is the first novel in the Crush series. It was published back in 2016 and has been on my TBR since about 2018. Since this is an “older” novel, it does read differently than one published today. This story follows book blogger and Star Trek fan, Vivian Galdi who works at a bookstore. After being with her crush, Jake, briefly, she has her heart broken and is determined to move on to find a new crush. Enter fellow book nerd Dallas Lang who soon becomes her next crush. From start to finish, the reader follows Viv on her journey of emotional growth internally and in romance.

Viv was an interesting character where I could not decide if I liked her or hated her. She had a ton of flaws that were very difficult to overlook at times, but she did have a lot of potential with her character. She made a lot of bad decisions. I think if the author wanted to include this, then there should have been a greater learning experience for Viv. There is a major traumatic attempted assault in the novel that does drive the plot, but I do think that it wasn’t explored enough. This, I think, was the major crux of my issue with this story as I felt Viv never dealt with her conflicts whether ginormous or tiny. Since this novel was written back in 2016, I think if the author continued to write and I read a novel by her today, maybe some of these issues would be fixed. Overall, there is a glimmer of potential in the writing and I may, at least, give the spinoff novel in this series a try soon.