Finn Rhodes Forever by Stephanie Archer | ARC Review
Childhood best friends turned broken hearts turned lovers
Another day, another ARC (“Advanced Reader Copy”), this time from an author I discovered during my free Kindle Unlimited trial month! Fitting, then, that I joined Stephanie Archer’s ARC team just in time for the conclusion to the series I first “met” her through- Queen’s Cove. We’ve seen Finn Rhodes’s brothers Emmett, Wyatt, and Holden fall in love over the course of the first three books, so finally we get to learn exactly what went down between him and his childhood best friend Olivia, which has been hinted about throughout the series.
Olivia Morgan is on a deadline: she’s put off finishing her PhD dissertation for years because the subject of it eludes her- a pink flower native to her home of Queen’s Cove that was long thought to be extinct but that she knows is still out there, just in a new area as a result of it adapting to the changing climate. To discover the flower and study how it’s managing to survive in a new location due to increasing coastal temperatures would be huge to the world of forestry sciences, and would allow Olivia to not only finally get her doctorate, but would also save her from the humiliation of chasing this allegedly extinct flower for the past several years. Her thesis advisor is leaving for a new position at a different program in the fall, though, and no one else at her current university will take her on because they think she’s crazy, so she’s got one last summer to find the pink sand verbena she knows is still out there.
How does she know it’s still out there? Because years ago, she saw it herself, floating down a creek in the woods, when she was hiking with her former best friend, Finn Rhodes.
Finn Rhodes fucked up on grad night ten years ago, and has been running from that mistake ever since. When Olivia is their beloved hometown for the summers, he, now a firefighter, takes forest fire and search and rescue gigs elsewhere, and when she’s away at school he returns. But he’s sick of his nomadic existence, especially because despite still a little bit believing the reasons why he left, he knows he can’t go the rest of his life without the love of it in his arms. So he returns for good to Queen’s Cove to win back Olivia.
It’s lucky, then, that on the night Finn returns to town for good, Olivia’s trapped during a hike to find the flower by inclement weather and he’s dispatched to search and rescue her. It’s apparently not the first time Olivia’s been search-and-rescued during her solo hunt for the flower, so the town votes that she must only hike with a buddy from now on because of the financial drain on the search and rescue resources exclusively for her. Any guesses who volunteers to be her new hunting buddy?
Knowing Finn is an adrenaline junkie who loves the chase, Olivia realizes outright refusing his advances wouldn’t do any good, so she decides to pretend she’s totally into getting back together after all this time and then proceeds to How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days him. She gives herself an unhinged haircut, wears horrific clothes, takes him on boring or traumatizing “romantic dates,” but despite her best efforts, he’s more determined than ever to see this through with her, prove to her he’s a different man from the boy who ran off. While Olivia wrestles with her growing attraction to him (or did it ever really leave?) and her almost pathological inability to be vulnerable with other people, Finn struggles with learning his hometown still sees him as a teenage screwup who has only ever let people down.
There’s a lot to like in this book. Shenanigans as the two BFFs essentially prank each other into falling in love (though at first Olivia is sure her antics are a one way ticket to “getting dumped”), deep conversations in the deep woods, a determined pink-haired scientist searching for hidden treasure, a shameless fireman who will walk the entire mountain until the end of time to help her. The cover is exceptional as well. Also, the sex? Especially since Finn holds off “going all the way” until he thinks she loves him, even if she’s still too scared to say it out loud? 🫠 (that’s the my face is melting emoji, holy hell does this book deliver on the sex)
It’s not my favorite of the series (I think that honor has to go to either book 2 or 3), but it was a highly enjoyable read, and a somewhat inverted grumpy/sunshine (though I don’t know if Olivia is consistently grumpy enough in the way most classic grumpy heroes are to truly be labeled thusly). Personally, though, I think what keeps me from fully engaging with this series as a whole (and this book in particular) is that a lot of the punches are pulled when it comes to character decisions. Everyone, even when they’re behaving poorly, is too easily forgiven (within the pages, at least), the decisions are a little softer even when they’re made in anger or hurt. So the stakes seem a little low. These aren’t quite cinnamon roll characters, but they’re close, and I like characters with a little more bite to them, because it makes the conclusions all the more satisfying.
This book was also a little oddly paced, with both characters being a little too self-aware too early in the book about their own (and each others’) motivations, and while I’m happy the ending turned out the way it did, because I’m not a monster, even for a romance novel I felt it was a little too nicely tied up. You can see every single conclusion coming from every stray story arc, and though that’s true for a lot of romances, the relative lack of strife on page (as opposed to the 10+ years of strife we’re told about but never actually get to see) leaves me wanting. Basically no one had to compromise or change at all, they all (beyond just Finn and Olivia) just realized they needed to be nicer to themselves and each other and they’d get a happily ever after.
Where does that leave us? With a comforting and spicy read between two fun, sexy, if a little flat characters that’s perfect for a summer beach vacation. This whole series, available on Kindle Unlimited (if you have a Prime account, you can get a month free!) is best read that way, I think- on the beach or by the pool while you’re on vacation and you just want to relax. Not a bad thing, and perhaps my biggest problem with the series was that I was reading it over the winter when I was looking for the emotional battering ram I’d get from an Abby Jimenez book.
If you like tropey romantic comedies with solid writing and characters with off the charts sexual and comedic chemistry, Finn Rhodes Forever, and the whole Queen’s Cove series, is for you.
Rating: 4/5
How hot? 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
On Friday, I’ll be recommending books with kickass heroines!
What should I be reading next? Let me know in the comments!