Review: Stir Me Up

Title: Stir Me Up
Author: Sabrina Elkins
Publisher: HarlequinTEEN
Release Date: October 1, 2013
Format: eGalley

Cami Broussard has her future all figured out. She’ll finish her senior year of high school, then go to work full-time as an apprentice chef in her father’s French restaurant, alongside her boyfriend, Luke. But then twenty-year-old ex-Marine Julian Wyatt comes to live with Cami’s family while recovering from serious injuries. And suddenly Cami finds herself questioning everything she thought she wanted.
Julian’s all attitude, challenges and intense green-brown eyes. But beneath that abrasive exterior is a man who just might be as lost as Cami’s starting to feel. And Cami can’t stop thinking about him. Talking to him. Wanting to kiss him. He’s got her seriously stirred up. Her senior year has just gotten a lot more complicated…—via Goodreads

I like this book a ridiculous amount.

In Stir Me Up, author Sabrina Elkins does what I feel like is sometimes so elusive for writers to capture—the feeling of anxiety that is inherent in being a high school senior.

Sure, senior year is exciting and fun, but there is a very large sense of fear that accompanies that fun. Even for the most prepared 18-year-old on the planet, who knows exactly what they want out of life, the idea of leaving home and leaving your childhood is at least a little bit scary. And in Stir Me Up, the main character, Cami—an aspiring chef and all-around very mature teenager—has all sorts of fears, confusion, doubts, and anxieties about what her future holds.

But more than that, though she’s realizing what she wants to do with her life, the idea of who she’ll be doing it with is rapidly changing. As soon as she meets her stepmother’s nephew, Julian, a 20-year-old wounded war veteran who moves into her house for rehab, her entire world shifts. But the two don’t get along at first, which, of course, always makes for a fun read due to the slow burn of the romance.

I do enjoy a good slow burn.

Overall, Stir Me Up is a really satisfying read full of food porn, a trip to a ski lodge that will make you want to immediately take to the slopes, a pretty hot romance, and that exhilarating feeling of taking charge of your future and making it your own.