2.5/5 stars... *spoilers*
First, I am very grateful for having been given an advanced copy of this book, and while I did not enjoy it, other people will. I am not hating on the author, I just personally did not enjoy the story.
It just was not for me.. I was really excited for this arc because the premise of academic rivals to lovers fighting for a single spot in a PhD program seemed amazing. It started out as expected with Colin being a dick, but I was like "That's to be expected, he'll get better as the book goes on." I was wrong.
Starting with Colin: if you asked this man to define "communication" he would look at you with a blank stare. He has never communicated properly a day in his life. You would think if he had issues with communication (or a lack thereof) in his previous relationship with Allison, he would realize he needs to communicate better with her the second time around. Nope, he did not learn. Shockingly, his poor communication caused a huge rift/break-up between him and Allison, again. What does he do to fix it? Randomly shows up at her place in knightly shining armor telling her he's so sorry and wants to get back together. Not my thing, but to each their own.
Moving onto Allison. (Please note: I am also a people pleaser to my core, and I understand Allison's need to make people around her happy and not to 'rock the boat') Throughout the entire book, she lets people walk all over her (*cough cough* her mom *cough cough*). Her mom gives her grief the WHOLE book about Allison not wanting to be around her father anymore (because he never gave her what she needed in a dad) and Allison doesn't stick up for herself. She continues going back whenever her mom asks. And when Colin does *that* with his presentation she decided not to go forward with talking to her professor about it, just letting it slide.
On another note: I really liked Sophie, she was cool.
Anyways, while I did not enjoy this book, other people do and will love it. This is just my own personal experience, and again I am very grateful for having been given an advanced copy of this book,

Ok so second chance romance is either a hit or miss for me. No In-between for some reason. It’s either done really well l, or done horrible. This was one of the unfortunate ones who fall under the not so well done. That may just be me, but I could not and I mean could not connect or even root for these two main characters. It was just meh

I can't believe this is a debut author - the writing is great! I liked the second chance romance trope a lot! I was so mad at one point but it was explained well and redeemed the story. There is some fat-phobia by secondary characters, but the main character has a very body positive attitude.

Thanks to NetGalley and publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Second chance romance/enemies-to-lovers in a grad school setting! How could I resist?

Unfortunately, I didn't connect to this book the way I hoped to, and I wasn't rooting for this couple the way you should in a romance novel. Allison and Colin dated for a while in college, and end up in the same grad school program years later. There is clearly a lot of anger for Allison because of their break-up, and also towards her father, and these are two central issues throughout this book. I felt like we didn't get enough time on page with Allison actually being happy or having a wide range of emotions. The competition in their dynamic felt really frustrating to me, because the fact that Colin was competing for Allison's spot was really irredeemable at this point in their relationship. Even when his motivations are revealed, it doesn't make me feel great about his character or their relationship. Another thing that drove me actually crazy while reading was the frequency that Allison lied to make herself look better to her teacher or Colin. It was so obvious to me that she would eventually be found out-- and it seemed so immature. Overall, I just have so many complaints and not enough great feelings about this book.

On the bright side, I liked the setting. I was intrigued by their area of study: medieval literature. Scenarios where these two characters were teaching about Beowulf and discussing it were the only parts of the book I think I truly enjoyed.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for a chance to read this e-ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts!

This delightful book kept me up long hours into the night (or shall I say knight?!) Allison and Colin, once lovers, meet again at a university, but this time they are in a Ph.D. program. Both TA's for Professor Wendy, they are competing for the single advisee position which is pivotal for a tenure track. Along the way, bragging and being cautious soon leads to sparks flying.

What I enjoyed about this book was seeing the maturity and personal growth each character goes through from their first relationship to their second friendship. Can current events make up for past heart aches? Can Allison look beyond another betrayal?! This will be the ultimate make-up test!!

Thank you to Jenny Howe, the publisher, and NetGalley for this advance readers copy in exchange for my honest review. I look forward to reading more books by Jenny!

I didn’t love this book. And I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if I even liked this book. It wasn’t bad but I couldn’t really connect with Allison and I didn’t feel the chemistry between her and Colin like I was hoping to. Also a strange comment, but she mentioned scooping her corgi up under her arm and unless Monty was less than a year old that’s really not plausible with a corgi (I can barely hold my 18lb corgi with one arm and she’s on the small side). I liked the academic back and forth between Colin and Allison even though I didn’t understand the Medieval English references.

Former lovers to enemies to lovers, sweet and heartfelt story about coming of age and navigating love and academia.

Allison Avery and Colin Benjamin are not only exes turned academic rivals, they will now have to compete for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance in their college careers.

The Make-Up Test is a unique twist on a rivals to lovers romance. The plot to this book sounded interesting and there was quite a bit of hype from other authors but it just doesn’t follow through. I love academic, nerdy romances but this one was not for me.

Neither of the main characters are particularly relatable or even likable. They are written in an “opposites-attract” way, but their behavior towards each other is so juvenile.

The book itself seems too long for the plot. The storyline dragged on unnecessarily. There were definitely some pacing issues.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press!

Thank you St. Martins Press for the gifted eARC.

DNF @ 34%. At the point I decided to stop reading there was nothing "wrong" with it, it just wasn't holding my attention enough to want to continue. The constant remembering of how things used to be and the pining over an ex who didn't seem so great wasn't really working for me. Basing my 3 stars on what I had read so far - "it was fine".

I wanted to love this but the storyline was waaaaaay too muddled. There was too much going on between the friendship between Sophie and Allison, Allison’s family relationships, the academic stuff, Wendy’s classes and the relationship with Colin. The romance wasn’t even that believable because it seemed like there were a ton of unresolved issues between Colin and Allison.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, a generous, maybe too generous, 3 stars.
Like, it wasn't the worst book I've read this year (shout out to The Dead Romantics) but it certainly wasn't great or even necessarily _good_. The leads were not interesting. Maybe I'm just too old for their 23 year old nonsense, but having your BIG LOVE/the one who got away~~ be someone you dated for 8 (E I G H T) entire months your sophomore year in college is maybe hugely stupid? Also in maybe I'm too old for this news, her casually frequently drinking to excess is not a cute character trait. That scene where she drank like 6 bud lites in a row because of her ~life drama? Literally grow up. And UGH that bit where she is SO immature that she literally shoves herself and Colin into a mud puddle because one of her students was nearby at the zoo was truly the dumbest thing.
These characters feel Extremely YA so it's weird this is being marketed as an ~adult romance. Neither of these people deserve happiness.
PS: it's dumb, but having a Colin/Cole character was genuinely confusing.

This book has a lot of tropes I am interested in. Like academic rivals, second chance romance, etc. It took me a couple of chapters to get into this book, which was not an issue at all because when I got into it, I was not able to get out. The tropes were perfectly explored by the author and I loved how you can actually see the growth of the love interest in this book as you go along because, Of course, pobodys nerfect. It has a twist at the end which I kind of saw coming but not really it was also written and executed perfectly by the author. But I would really want you to give this book a chance. It's amazing.
I Spoilers ahead €
I gave it 4's because the reason for the first break up between the characters kind of pissed me off. It was kind of "I broke up with you because I knew what was better for you' which I don't really prefer but it's really subjective.

The Make-Up Test was innocuously just-ok for about 85%, and the final 15% reduced me to a pile of incandescent rage. My reviews of other ARCs here speak, I hope, to the fact that I really do try to review books - especially ARCs from debut authors - with an even hand and an open mind. I came to The Make-Up Test with enthusiasm and excitement for the premise. But the conclusion hit really, really close to home by holding up some of academia's most pernicious ideas, in particular glorifying and upholding women's burden to blunt their ambition to stroke the ego of their male colleagues.

The basic premise of this book is that Allison and Colin were academic rivals as undergraduates at Brown. They broke up (for reasons left unnecessarily mysterious to the reader for half the book) only to find themselves, two years later, academic rivals once again in grad school. They are both Medievalists vying for the same position working with a superstar advisor who has (rather unprofessionally, I think) turned her one mentorship slot into a semester-long academic Hunger Games. Colin and Allison both want the slot, and in the course of fighting over it, fall back in love.

Things started out with some winsome characterization. Allison has a lot of very-relatable grad-school anxieties and insecurities, Colin has a few character details (a loud squawky laugh, a penchant for cardigans) that felt unique. However, the treatment of the primary romantic conflict between them quickly lost me. Colin and Allison swung back and forth between hating each other and getting along with very little external or internal motivation for their attitude changes. In the flashback scenes and in the present ones, Colin vacillated between being a pompous self-important jerk, and being so demonstratively soft and vulnerable it felt, in comparison, like an act he put on to seem like a "nice guy." Allison would change her mind about him with little prompting, and neither of them explored at any point where exactly their obsession with academic competition was coming from.

But what started to sneak up on me as I was reading was that... the book was silently omitting a major consideration about Allison and Colin's Competitive Hijinks. Colin is repeatedly presented to the reader as less motivated, less prepared, and less knowledgeable than Allison. Many of his academic ideas are shown, quite rightly, to be under-considered and underbaked. In the past storyline, we learn that he broke up with her in an incredibly immature way because of his own intellectual insecurities. (He at one point whines that he didn't get into grad school initially because he wasn't able to stand out against all the other straight white male applicants, which sounds like a rather pernicious repetition of the bogus idea that it's "harder" for cishet white men to succeed in academia???). Allison's work, by comparison, is presented to readers as careful and incisive, based on nearly a decade of study in a field that Colin has just casually dropped into within the last two years.

And it started to occur to me that.... well, it's a bit odd that we are never asked to consider whether Colin's ability to constantly outcompete Allison - in her own field - for institutional accolades might be based on how others react to him as a conventionally attractive cishet white man? And to her as a young, plus-sized woman? This dynamic particularly comes through in the teaching scenes. Allison's recitation students often act openly dismissive of her, talk over her, and generally ignore her expertise. The students all, in contrast, think Colin is a genius intellectual rockstar. If the text had given us an example of their differing teaching styles, I might be able to buy this dynamic. But their actual skills don't factor into the narrative at all. And... I just... there is extensive research into gender bias in the classroom and how it affects student reception of teachers. But the book never presents that as a possible explanation?

Still, I was ready to chalk this up to a plotting omission. Maybe the book had just forgotten to show me whether Colin was, in fact, earning his superstar reputation?

And then the ending happened. And I... dissolved into a pile of rage.

(I'm going to get a bit spoilery here, so look away if you don't want to be spoiled.)

Essentially, Colin and Allison have to give a big presentation that is going to help determine which one of them gets the coveted graduate mentorship. Allison has been working on her presentation - about beauty as beastliness - for the better part of a year. She enthusiastically shares her ideas with Colin, and then asks him to share his. He has approximately 2.5 unoriginal and underdeveloped ideas, and she (very patiently, and with extreme care for his feelings) explains based on her expertise that most of those have already been done, encourages him to explore the least awful idea. He instead rocks up the day of his presentation (which takes place before hers) and opens his PowerPoint to reveal that he has stolen the TITLE AND TOPIC OF ALLISON'S PRESENTATION. At which point she storms out. Understandably.

We then go through a series of narrative contortions where it's suggested that this blatant plagiarism is actually a good thing for Allison, because it will force her to think of new and even BETTER ideas. Ideas that she has to stay up all night preparing while at her father's funeral. Hands up, women in academia, if you've ever had to take on additional labor because some dude couldn't be bothered to do his own work!

Later it comes to light that Colin actually analyzed a slightly different text than Allison planned to analyze. And the book actually, sincerely, suggests we blame HER for jumping to conclusions and storming out of his presentation before she could realize the slight differences in their approach. I mean, come on. He stole her title. And her topic. And she texted him multiple times as he was preparing, to ask why he had been distant. (His only explanation is that his grandfather was sick, and that... I kid you not... he knew building off her original idea was the only way to "level the playing field" and have a chance against her). And with very little discussion, she not only takes him back, but spends a long time beating herself up for not giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, this, right here, is the sentence that sealed it for me. This is what Allison says to Colin after he stole her idea, and then failed to tell her about it, and then harassed her to get back together with him:

"Colin. You're every bit as smart as me. And a hundred times more charismatic." She sighed. "It's my fault you don't feel that way."


Yes, that's right. It's Allison's fault. For not sufficiently stroking this man's ego while he stole her ideas. I could probably write a thousand more words about how absolutely toxic this is. How this book glamorizes the emotional labor of reassuring cishet white men of their genius. But honestly, this book doesn't deserve that much of my time.

I will mention a couple different things in passing that readers might want to be aware of if they pick up this book: it's set in a "post-COVID" future, though that really only shows up in 2-3 parentheticals where Allison looks back and thinks about the pandemic, glad that it's over (*sob*). There is a subplot with Allison's emotionally abusive father, who constantly criticizes her weight and her career choices. While Allison does finally set some boundaries, the narrative mostly undermines them by having his secretary show up at the funeral to tell Allison he actually said nice things about her. At his office. Where she couldn't hear them. "Your abusive parent was secretly nice about you behind your back" is not a plot point I have any time for.

Anyway, maybe I went in too hard on this book. I will fully admit to it hitting some personal areas of sensitivity. But, you know, those of you reading this might share some of those! So, if you've ever been a woman in academia, as I am, and felt like you had to work two times as hard for half the recognition, if you've ever watched a male colleague rake in teaching accolades while you're dinged for being too "moody" or not "cool" enough, don't worry: this book is here to tell you it's your fault, actually, for not encouraging his mediocre ideas enough.

*sigh*

This book surprised me quite a bit. I chose it for the romance and the promise of a plus size MC that actually loved herself and was confident. While this story had all of these things, it had so much more depth to it than I expected.

The academic side of it made my teacher heart happy, especially all of the references to literature in their classes. But the thing I appreciated the most was the complexity of the two MCs and their love story. It wasn’t perfect or tropey, it was very realistic and very engaging. It felt natural and made me feel so much more for the characters than a typical romance novel.

I definitely look forward to reading other books from this author.

DNF at 36%

I was really looking forward to reading this one, but sadly it just didn’t work for me at all. I tried to get into it, but after 36%, I found that I still didn’t care about or particularly like Colin or Allison (or any of the characters really). This is supposed to be a second chance romance, but this is one of the rare times when I don’t want the main characters to reconcile at all. Colin really was so horrible.

*I voluntarily read an advance review copy of this book*

Allison Avery loves the academic medieval world of literature like nothing else in her life so starting the Ph.D. program at Claymore University is the beginning of her dreams coming true. Allison once felt the same about Colin Benjamin until he broke her heart sophomore year after stealing an important college prize out from under her. In a tale worthy of her heroes such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Allison is stunned to see Colin not only in her program, but that they are once again in competition as TAs for the same professor who can only keep one of them at the semester’s end to be her advisee.

Allison has several other life challenges including her roommate and best friend drifting away to a different life as well as her relationship with a very difficult and seemingly uncaring father whose health is precarious. Allison’s determination to best Colin not only to prove herself academically and secure the coveted position has not a small element of payback for the heartache Colin caused her. Although he tries to explain what happened she is not interested in raking up the past, or least that is what Allison tells herself…repeatedly. The two years they have been apart have helped Allison and Colin mature; however, they both have that competitive spark that can sometimes be hurtful and cruel.

Anyone who has ever been a literature major or in graduate school will recognize and appreciate the obsessive nature of inhabitants in the hallowed halls and rarified atmosphere of those striving for the Ph.D. prize. The stress of competing for their ultimate goals certainly puts extreme pressure on Allision and Colin who both have family issues weighing them down. As they spend forced time together, Allison and Colin both realize mistakes they made and begin to see that perhaps, they can find their way back to each other but at what cost?

One thing I do not understand about these graduate students is how people who are so cerebral and determined to shine in their fields can spend so much time imbibing to the point of being drunk. Do they not care about the effects on those precious brain cells? Other than that aspect of the story, as someone who has read most of the medieval literature works that frame this book, I appreciated being back in that world. Readers who struggled with said works or who are unfamiliar, will get a glimpse and begin to understand why people still are enamored centuries later. There is indeed nothing new under the sun including the themes of life, loss, and love.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
🌶🌶 (light details)

✅ second chance
✅ enemies to lovers
✅ academic rivals

👉🏻 swipe for synopsis

The competitiveness between Allison and Colin 100% drove this book and the tension was just *chefs kiss*. While the book isn't divided into past and present, Jenny Howe gives us some great looks into Allison and Colin's first try at romance. My favorite part of this book is the character development of Colin that doesn't happen on page but is still so prevalent! While he did some bad things in the past, I just wanted to hug him when he was trying to make amends with Allison and she was having NONE of it - which I respect. In addition to the romance, a big part of this story is about Allison coming to terms with different aspects of her life and learning to move forward and believe in herself.

I can acknowledge that this was well-written, but this story just wasn’t for me. I found it to be too slow for my tastes, and the relationship between Colin and Allison left something to be desired. Maybe if I knew a bit about medieval literature, I would’ve liked it more? I’m anti-DNF but I did scan quickly through the last half of this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC.

Thanks to St. Martins Griffin for the free book.
I have so many mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I enjoyed the story to read the whole thing. On the other hand, I have complaints. I liked how this book featured a fat positive main character. Allison stands up for herself and her image against those that bully her for it. I liked her confidence with this and with her being sure that she knows her stuff when it comes to her PhD program. She worked hard to get where she was and deserved her place. I do wish she would've explored some of her thoughts in therapy because sometimes she did need a confidence boost. My biggest complaint is that this was a second chance romance instead of just enemies to lovers. I didn't mind Allison and Colin together, I'm just not sure that Colin was worthy of a second chance. They felt immature when it came to this relationship, which I expect from a first time, but not a second. I think that this will be a fan for those that like academic romance. I know it's getting lots of love, so if it sounds interesting, I do recommend giving it a try.

Allison is a PhD student at a prestigious university, something she's dreamed of since she was a kid. Unfortunately, she finds herself in the program with her ex-boyfriend, Colin - who not only broke her heart but also copied her course of study where he previously had no interest in medieval lit. This is kind of a hybrid of enemies-to-lovers and second-chance, but what I found most interesting was the glimpse into grad school life, which I knew nothing about before reading. I appreciated that COVID was touched upon in a vague way (this is some kind of post-COVID world, though a year isn't specified, but there are references to still carrying masks just in case), as I've wondered how authors will handle this as we get more and more past March 2020 and it seems outdated to ignore it, but this certainly didn't dwell on it. Overall, a cute read, though Allison's stubborn competitiveness (to the point of being fake) was a bit tiresome at times.