Member Reviews
I enjoyed this short steamy romance about Amanda and Jem. It was sweet the way he introduced her into the world of romance and the art of making love.
This story was hot, Forbidden, and unforgettable! I couldn’t put it down!
New author to me.I was excited to start it ,it sounded hot.I like it at the beginning but in some parts it felt a little bit slow.I didn't like the characters as much as I wanted.It was an ok story.
I enjoyed this book. It was a quick dirty read and everything you expect from this author!
This story is not only about the sex but about the growth and sensual awakening of the main character that lends itself an incredible and exciting vulnerability. A beautiful tale.
I really enjoyed this book. I thought it was a lot of fun with some steamy scenes thrown in. It was a fairly short read so the characters weren’t overly developed and the story was simple but it was definitely an enjoyable read.
The story starts with Amanda Slade joining a app that tracks the loss of her virginity. For some reason she feels that if she doesn’t lose her virginity by her 23rd birthday she will be alone for the rest of her life. This never really made sense to me but it was what got the story started and played a pretty big part in the end.
Professor Jem Nichols was someone I wish I had had as a Professor when I was in college. He was steamy hot and very dedicated to showing Amanda what a real romance is supposed to be. Jem wanted their relationship to be real and not get any bad backlash from others so he insisted they start their relationship after the end of the semester, that way he would no longer be her teacher. Then when they finally started officially seeing each other, he didn’t want to be one of those people that just immediately jumped on a girl because she was available and a virgin. I think more guys should be like that.
Overall, the story was a lot of fun. While sex played a large role in the story, their growing relationship was the main plot. The ending was super steamy and sexy. I recommend this to anyone who loves erotic romance with a little more meaning thrown in.
Being honest, I didn't finish this book. There was something about the characters that I didn't like, I couldn't connect with them so I didn't really care what happened to them.
This gentle, sexy read with a slow-burn story was everything I hoped for. Not the usual student/teacher crush relationship, this student wants to pop her cherry before she reaches 22 - based on an astrology reading.. Her College Art teacher is considerate and respectful - even to the point of waiting until the end of the semester before embarking on his slow, seductive build up to a very satisfying climax. Thank you, Netgalley for sending this advance copy to my Kindle.
I wasn't really impressed with this book. Amanda's sole focus on losing her virginity seemed to completely take over the storyline. It came across extremely annoying and immature. I felt very frustrated by her character by the end of the book. Worth the read if you are look
I liked the tease of the whole story. It was a good love story. It did start a little slow for me but I liked it.
Unable to review as title was archived the same evening I got the approval email.
I wavered between 3 and 4 stars for Stay After Class for a long time after I was done reading. Ultimately, I decided on 4 stars because I did end up liking it. That's not to say that I didn't find certain problems with it, though.
Amanda is a 21, almost 22, year old student who is determined to rid herself of her v card. When she was 16, her mother took her to get a reading from her astrologer. He told her that she wouldn't miss having male attention until she was 21, and that would be the time when she'd start become interested in men and sex. If she didn't get rid of her virginity when she was still 21, she'd have to wait two more years before an opportunity would arise for her to lose it again. Now that she's almost 22 and she's almost done with college, she's finally developed an interest in a man. Unfortunately for her, it's a professor, a professor who is her art professor. Yeah...
Thus begins the long, somewhat draggy at times, journey of Amanda and Jem (Professor Nichols). Once Jem deduces that Amanda is as interested in him as he is in her, he starts to slowly seduce her. The sexual tension was really thick between the two, and sometimes Amanda (and I) despaired that they'd ever have actual penetrative sex. He dragged out the seduction to serious lengths. First using just his words to seduce her. Then after awhile, just his fingers, then just his fingers and tongue. By the time they got around to the actual, full act of sex, the end was almost upon the reader. While I am all for delayed gratification, Jem took it too far for my tastes. At times his slow seduction was flat out annoying and ridiculous, not to mention the way he talked to her while seducing her was too flowery and somewhat formal, it took me out of the story at times. The fact that Amanda was 11 years younger than he was made clear in the at times too condescending way he treated her. Yes, she was naive and really innocent compared to him, but she wasn't immature or a child, so the condescension wasn't necessary or appreciated.
In contrast, I liked Amanda. She was a refreshing change from a lot of the college age heroines in romances lately. She's smart, sweet, has her head on straight and knows what she wants. Can't fault her in any way for that. Jem, though, I didn't really connect with. He was too hot and cold with her and wasn't really that great of a match for her, at least I don't think so. If he had been presented as either more alpha and commanding, (think James Hunter in Ivy Smoak's Hunted series) or younger and more of Amanda's generation, I think I would have connected with him. As written, though, he lay in some sort of weird middle of the road place between old fashioned and smooth, sexual charmer. I just couldn't bring myself to like him, unfortunately.
I did end up liking Stay After Class, though. Mostly because I liked Amanda so much, but also because I enjoyed that it wasn't the typical professor/student forbidden type romance. Well, it was forbidden, but it wasn't executed in the same way as most of its type, it is a little more out of the box in that he didn't just bulldoze his way into her bed, he used a little more finesse (too much, ironically) and kept her on the edge of her seat with anticipation. If you like delayed gratification then Stay After Class just may be the book for you.
'Stay After Class" by A. C. Rose is the story of Jem and Amanda.
Amanda is in college and who will be turning 22 in a very short period of time and wants to lose her virginity. Amanda has her sights set on Jem who is her College Art teacher. Jem is older than she is and Amanda finds older men attractive. Jem plays slow with Amanda but you can't tell it will be hot exciting relationship these two are gonna have.
Once I started their story I didn't want to put it down!
"My honest review is for a special copy I voluntarily read."
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Erratum:
At one point I read, "I tried to not to sound whinny." I think the author meant whiny. This isn't the kind of mistake a spell-checker will catch! Other than that the book was pretty decently-edited and formatted of the crappy Kindle app in which I read it.
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. I'm not a big fan of so-called 'V-card' stories because I've read several and they have been almost universally dumb. This one sounded like it might be a cut above the rest, and I am sorry to have to report that it was not.
AC Rose has been described as "an author of steamy erotic fiction for women." Well they got the fiction part right, but steamy and erotic? Not based on this sample which seemed to me to be languishing far more in the 'pedantic' and 'juvenile' categories than anywhere else.
It should have been titled 'Fifty Shades of Bland' because it really had nothing new to offer, least of all erotica. Far too many authors conflate 'erotic' with 'sexual' and while the two are connected, one might say intimately, they are not the same thing by any means. I'm sorry this author doesn't seem to realize that, because if she had, I think that the the story would have played out differently, and been better for it.
The plot is that senior college student Amanda Slade is a virgin who has decided, for reasons which are never really explained, that she must disrobe herself of this mantle by her twenty-second birthday which is a scant few weeks away. The man she's chosen for this task is her art professor, Jem Nichols. There is no reason whatsoever given for her choice other than the most shallow: he looks studly.
Character naming is important to me, and I had to wonder about the author's choice of name for her main female character: Amanda. It carries within it the word 'man' which is associated with things masculine, but also with other words such as 'mandate' itself a fun word. The name is from the Latin and means 'worthy of love', but Amanda wasn't about love at all, she was solely about sex. This is all she had on her mind all day every day. In short, she came across as mentally ill to me, not as an erotic, sexy, or even interesting character. The professor was effectively no more than a personified penis, so he offered nothing either. There really were no other characters worth mentioning.
I don't doubt there are women as well as men who are as shallow, one-trick, and ultimately boring as Amanda, but I really have zero interest in reading about them. I like a story with my sex! If it's just sex, then it's uninteresting to me, and that was my mistake for thinking this had something else to offer other than rather adolescent ideas about sex, which in the right literary context can be interesting, but which here were flat, monotonous, and uninventive.
The characters never were people, merely placeholders in a sexual game of checkers, wherein the pieces were nudged in a formulaic manner from one fixed square to the next, following a rigid set of moves. This is how the erotic became banished from this story. There was no fluidity and nothing unexpected. The author was simply shoving pieces around a board, employing entirely the wrong kid of rigidity for a something wishing to be a good story about a real sexual relationship!
The lack of realism was rife. The art class where Amanda most commonly encountered her target was an elective, and why she was doing it was unexplained, since she's a business major. If she was serious about her career, there were lots of other classes she could have taken. If something had been written about her wanting to go into advertising, and so was studying art because of that, then that would have been something, but the only conclusion the author left us to draw in this art class was that there was no reason for Amanda to be there other than that it offered talk about bodies and the opportunity to see a nude male, which Amanda has apparently never seen before! This is where the story began to really come apart for me.
Amanda was not remotely a credible character. She came across as juvenile and shallow, which are credible character traits in the right context, but here, she had nothing else to offer. While I don't doubt that there are twenty-one and twenty-two year old virgins, for the author to expect us to believe that Amanda, who was nothing but sexual thoughts, had never even so much as French-kissed a guy (or even a girl) or had any physical experience of men whatsoever is completely absurd. It simply did not fit in with her thought processes.
If she was that obsessed with sex, she would have at least experimented long before she turned twenty-one! Yes, if she'd been raised in some fundamentalist Christian sect or led a truly sheltered life, then maybe I might have bought into her complete lack of experience, but there was no indication whatsoever that she'd had an unusual childhood, and for her to be having constant sexual fantasies, yet to have never done anything to explore even one of them was just the opposite of erotic and not remotely credible!
The author expects us to swallow that Amanda has never even touched herself! If this had been set in the fifties, then I could have bought that assertion, but it was not. It's a thoroughly contemporary story and to suggest that a woman who is so obsessed with sex has never even masturbated is utter bullshit. That was the point I quit reading this story. It was the last straw in a whole bale of such straw.
It's tempting to give the author some kudos for at least touching upon how thoroughly inappropriate it is for a professor to become involved with one of his students. That doesn't even seem to cross the mind of most authors of works like this, but in the context of this story, I got the impression it had only been put in there as a cynical nod to propriety, because it's clear that it never was even a blip on the moral radar of either character. Also, there never was any portion of this story that I read which ever touched upon STDs, which is always a fail for me.
I know that talk of those in a novel claiming to be erotic is rather counter-productive, but I think it should at least get a mention in this day and age, so I tend to automatically fail authors who do not at least mention it, unless there's a very good reason to let it slide.
I labeled this 'Fifty Shades of Bland' for good reason. Not only was there was nothing about it to distinguish it from a sperm-load of other novels in a way-overcrowded genre, there was also the absurdity of the professor's character. He pompously set himself up as the sex-god teacher of this desperate house-virgin, and it was laughable. He's the only one who can masterfully control her own body and bring her to fruition? How insulting to her is that? I can see a guy writing this stuff, but for a female author to write about a woman like this in 2017 is inexcusable.
The professor's idea of teaching Amanda seemed to be rooted in the dom world of Fifty Shades, where he pedantically makes her wait, and teases and taunts her, but not in any sort of erotic or rational way. It read to me like he was intent upon making her suffer - either that or the author had given little thought to her plot other than artificially and amateurishly delaying dénouement.
If what he'd been doing had been interesting or unusual, that might have been something, but it was amateur and ridiculous and she, sad little submissive that she was, trotted along on his leash like a good little bitch. It was pathetic to read, poorly executed, and insulting to women. I like female characters to have a lot more get up and go than Amanda will ever have, and that's precisely what she should have done: got up and gone. The fact that she didn't made her uninteresting to me.
So in the end this was a fail, and I cannot recommend it as a worthy read. I quit reading it at forty-nine percent because it was quite honestly a tedious read. This is not something you want in a novel that's purported to be 'steamy'! Cold water, not steam, was the order of the day here, and I have better things to do with my time. Frankly I've read far more erotic novels where the author wasn't even trying for erotic, but was simply telling a realistic story. This one was far too focused on sex and not at all on telling a story, which is one reason why it was so bland and such a failure
I received a ARC from Netgalley for a honest review.
Good story, make me laugh some times. Amanda is obsessed with astrology and Jem is married with art but they find their time and embrace the ride.
The story has a lot of substance, building and developing the characters and storyline. I was a bit disappointed that some plot elements, aka the blackmail or the professors mood swings explored more.
College senior virgin desperately wants her cork popped before her next birthday, because a psychic told her to. She’s got her sights set on her art professor doing the honors, but the last thing she expected was for him to take her on a long frustrating journey to that point.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand it’s a well-told romance, but on the other. . . I can’t imagine her being that patient with someone who, as much as he wanted to do right by her, was manipulating her the entire way. He certainly wouldn’t have done that with an older woman, or one not as innocent. Despite his claims, it felt like this whole long timeline was more about him; she could have been more open about what her deadline and the dating app meant, but he treated her like a child far too much, and his excuse of “protecting” her was the ultimate in condescension.
As for the characters, Amanda was a lot of fun, as was her BFF. Even their emoji use was on point; the cherry with the fireworks was particularly hilarious, as well as the band-aid. As for him, he seems to be a genuinely nice guy who simply has no idea how to treat a modern woman; he seems to be stuck in some sort of weird age of chivalry, mixed with some Neanderthal “She’s mine” crap. Every other character seemed to be differing shades of evil.
I will admit the author almost got me by including a musical piece by one of my fave musicians, Jesse Cook, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t give any extra credit for that.
This was an okay read. I loved the premise, it what attracted me to the book, but the story was dragging in parts.
I guess I really didn't like Jem that much, the way he always kept Amanda hanging seemed immature. She was a very engaging, and self-aware, and everything I like in a person. Jem's handling of her seemed immature on his part. He would rush towards a subject, a moment, a connection, then withdraw without explanation, or vague and flowy reasons
Jem slightly redeemed himself in the end, but the aftertaste of his previous behaviour lingered
This is a steamy student/teacher romance. I liked Jem and Amanda, the chemistry is amazing and I really liked the story. Jem definitely does a great job drawing out his seduction. An entertaining read.