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by Nisha Sharma (5/1/2024) – Many thanks to @brilliancepublishing and @nishawrites for the gifted audiobook, which was beautifully narrated by Soneela Nankani and Vikas Adam. Below is my honest review.

There are two things Jessie Ahuja learned very quickly as a freshman at Hartceller University. First, Davidson Tower has been the subject of urban legends on campus for decades – everyone knows the rumors of star-crossed lovers who disappeared during a fire. Second, the most famous person on campus is Ravi Kumar, son of a tech billionaire. Jessie and Ravi couldn’t be more different – the son of privilege and the daughter on scholarship, she aspires to be an engineer while he turns his back on the tech world his family helped to define – but they keep crossing paths. After a disagreement over reserving a study space escalates into a dare to go into Davidson Tower, they stumble upon a hidden cache of love letters that may have belonged to the young woman who disappeared and decide to work together to turn their research of the couple into a class paper. Their search brings them closer together, and as they try to discover what happened in the past, they are drawn closer together, but will their fate follow that of the mysterious couple from the past?

This is Sharma’s first “new adult” romance novel, and I thought she landed on the perfect tone and romantic storyline for the intended age. If you know some of her other work, Sharma can bring the heat, so you can tell she made a conscious decision to navigate this genre. I loved how tender and thoughtful Jessie and Ravi were and how this felt like a real college experience – cheap beer, frat houses, worries about grades, late nights, goofy challenges, rule-breaking, and lots of firsts. It was interesting to see some of the parallels drawn between the past and the present (I won’t go into more details so as not to spoil the mystery), and I felt like the story had a deeply satisfying ending without making it seem more settled than would be appropriate for a couple of college kids.