Rowena’s review of Undeclared (Woodlands #1) by Jen Frederick.

For four years, Grace Sullivan wrote to a Marine she never met, and fell in love. But when his deployment ended, so did the letters. Ever since that day, Grace has been coasting, academically and emotionally. The one thing she’s decided? No way is Noah Jackson — or any man — ever going to break her heart again.

Noah has always known exactly what he wants out of life. Success. Stability. Control. That’s why he joined the Marines and that’s why he’s fighting his way — literally — through college. Now that he’s got the rest of his life on track, he has one last conquest: Grace Sullivan. But since he was the one who stopped writing, he knows that winning her back will be his biggest battle yet.

This is a mature New Adult book. I see that it is classified as YA – not sure how to change that – but I wanted to be clear that it has explicit love scenes in the story.

Grace Sullivan is in college, trying to forget about the guy that she fell in love with through letters.  For four years, Grace was pen pal to Noah Jackson.  Noah was serving overseas and he responded to Grace’s letter and a pen pal relationship started.  Over the years, the letters became more and more personal and then before either of them knew what was what…they were in love.

But when Noah comes home, he drops off the planet.  He just disappears from Grace’s life and she has no idea why.  Heartbroken, she goes to college and tries to move on with her life but it’s hard when you weren’t ready for the relationship to end and it ends anyway.

When Noah shows up at her college, as a student and wants to rekindle the relationship, Grace is not about it.  She’s afraid of getting hurt and Noah is afraid that he’s too late.  That he can’t save the only relationship that has meant anything to him since being in Afghanistan.

This book follows Noah and Grace as Noah tries to grovel his way back into Grace’s life and Grace tries to hold on to her sanity long enough to make sure that Noah never breaks her heart again.  I was all prepared to love the heck out of this story because I love military guys and I’m on a New Adult kick.  But both Noah and Grace trampled all over my nerves in this book.  The back and forth, the not being upfront with each other, the angst, all of it was a bit much for me to take.  I did end up liking the book because you can see the growth of both characters over the course of the book, but for some reason, I still didn’t completely love both Noah and Grace at the end.  I liked them fine but they weren’t my favorite characters.

I am mighty curious about Bo though.  I’m really looking forward to reading his book.  I liked the author’s writing style so I’m going to give her next book a go.  If you like military heroes and UFC guys then you’ll probably fall in love with Noah so you should give this a go.

Grade: 3.25 out of 5

This book is available from Jen Frederick.  You can purchase it here or here.