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The Deal: The Romance Novel That Was Smarter Than I Expected
What if the book you expected to dismiss turned out to understand something important before most people had the language for it?
Elle Kennedy’s The Deal looks, from the outside, like pure college romance: a hockey captain, a reluctant tutor, a fake relationship and the familiar machinery of attraction. But underneath that formula is a much more serious story about trauma, consent, safety and what it means to trust another person after someone has taken that choice away.
Kennedy follows Hannah Wells, a college student carrying the aftermath of sexual assault, and Garrett Graham, a hockey…
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