Older by Jennifer Hartmann

My Rating: ?

(I honestly don't know)

Spice Rating: 🌶🌶

Blurb:

Before he discovered my age, he uncovered my heart.

Bruised and abused, and victim to a loveless household, I shimmered with new life the moment he found me drowning my sorrows in a lake beneath the stars.

A chance encounter. An unspoken connection.

I was smitten; he was curious.

But, as everyone knew, fate could be decidedly cruel.

He called me Halley, like the comet.

I called him Reed.

And my best friend?

Well…she called him Dad.

Older is a forbidden, slow-burn, age-gap romance standalone, ending in an HEA.

My Review:

Older by Jennifer Hartmann has left me absolutely wrecked. I swear, no one writes like Jennifer. Her prose isn’t just beautiful, it’s surgical. Every sentence slices clean and precise, and you feel every emotion like it’s being carved right into you. I’ve loved every book I’ve ever read by her, and this one is no exception. Older is lyrical, devastating, and soaked in the kind of trauma-laced love that grips you by the throat.

But god… I don’t know how to feel about the story as a whole. I just don’t.

Did it make me feel something? Absolutely. Did it drag me through every shade of hurt and longing? Without question. At this point, I’m convinced Jennifer wakes up every morning thinking, “How can I emotionally annihilate my readers today?” Because she succeeds. Effortlessly.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say this: as an adult, you should never, ever find yourself thinking the things the MMC thinks about a minor, even if she lies, even if there’s consent, even if the situation is complicated. A lie that big, especially after he was transparent about his age, would make me question everything. If you can lie about that… what wouldn’t you lie about?

But here’s the thing, every story deserves to be told, even the ones that make us uncomfortable, even the ones that punch holes in our moral compass. A truly powerful book forces you to think, to question, to confront things you’d rather avoid. And that’s exactly what this book did.

It had me spiraling, wondering if what I was reading could even be called love at all.

Fuck, I don’t know.

This book put me through it. And I’m still sitting here, trying to sort through the mess of feelings it left behind.