Wow! I did not expect Loving Ben Cooper to wreck me like it did. I don’t often read celebrity/rockstar-based romances, and I can’t quite connect with them. However, Author C.C. Monroe wrote about themes that almost all readers could identify with and relate to.

Sadie, who wants to help people, takes on everyone’s hurt. I could see how her connection and “insta-love” happened so quickly with Ben. Ben’s dependence on Sadie to “silence his demons” seems only natural considering his issues, as he unintentionally uses her to fix what’s broken inside. They kept falling into a cycle of breaking, attempting to repair, not knowing how to repair, and failing to repair. C.C. Monroe built a solid story around all these things and did it well.

Loving Ben Cooper was a powerful story with well-written characters and an emotional plot that held strong to the end.

***3.5 Stars rated down to 3 Stars on websites not allowing half star reviews***

Addictive and emotional, Loving Ben Cooper is a fast-paced love story with all the signs and symptoms of toxicity. Ben is a rising rockstar on tour, and Sadie is an innocent nursing student bound by her faith. Ben and Sadie are a steamy pair with Sadie all but dropping her religious notions the moment she meets Ben. They progress at a “Romeo and Juliet” level fast. Their lack of commonalities is left by the wayside, but most importantly this sinner and saint have an intense love for each other in common. And that’s all that matters.

Loving Ben Cooper is one of those novels you can’t put down. Who knows what will happen next? Will Ben’s traumas get in the way? Does Sadie realize all she’s doing? Are her selfless acts enough? All questions I asked myself as I read over the past month.

Witnessing their love story was like watching two trains collide head-on. I didn’t know who or what would survive or what other elements would come into play that would save them. Everything was delicate and intricate and intimate. Often, I felt nosy for knowing their story.

Ben and Sadie are memorable characters. I don’t know I’ll ever forget them or their relationship. Loving Ben Cooper shed new light on how feelings can come first and everything else second. The love and passion C. C. Monroe has for this story is felt throughout, always pushing them to the brink of collapse but pulling back just enough to revive them.

I feel honored to have been able to experience Ben and Sadie and their universe. If you love a fast-paced, toxic story filled with forced proximity, angst, hardships, trauma, and most importantly love, then Loving Been Cooper should be on your read-now list. It’s the perfect rainy weekend, stuck-inside, passion read. After fans…you’ll love this!

Pro Tip: Listen to the soundtrack while reading. It’s chefs kisses.

Thank you to NetGalley, Frayed Pages x Wattpad, and C. C. Monroe for the ARC!

This was heart breaking and beautiful all at once. Sadie & Ben have that once in a lifetime kind of love. It’s intense, fast and all consuming. Ben has a rough past and a rock star lifestyle, Sadie is sweet and people pleasing to her core. Somehow they were drawn to one another and just fit, Was it perfect? No, it was even toxic at times. No matter what they always chose to love one another. Their story is raw and real and pulled at all of my heart strings. You get to feel
the good with the bad and everything in between. The emotions and fight, the love you feel it through every word CC writes in their story. This will be one that sticks with me, forever.

This is a perfect example of an insta-love, rock star story, and as a whole it was okay. I like insta-love and don’t mind reading a rock star story every once in a while. What I wasn’t a fan of was Sadie, the FMC. She gives up everything for him and he treats her like crap over and over again. Then when he finally decides to treat her right she forgives him so easily. It just didn’t really make me like her as a character, she just felt flat and doormat-ish. As for the book, I liked the first half more than the second half because of all of the drama, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Loving Ben Cooper is the best rockstar romance I’ve read in a hot minute. So so good. Is it insta lovey? Yes, a little, but I was okay with it. I loved the moment he saw her from the stage and just was ensnared. So swoony. The spice was so good and spread out through the book. Also, I like how even though Ben had a lot of trauma to work through, he put the work and didn’t depend on Sadie for that. Loved the emotional aspect. CC,.. amazing job.

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This is a whirlwind of a romance about huge all encompassing love. Ben and Sadie are twin flames. Ben is a rockstar with a lot of growing up to do. He has only truly been "famous" for about a year and yet he is full emersed in the lifestyle of drugs, women, and partying add in his mental health issues and he is on the edge of falling apart more often than not. Sadie is the total opposite - church loving virginal, honest, rule following and her dream is to be a nurse.

These two get swept up in the heat of their romance and things escalate quickly. There are very high highs and very low lows. The author explores both characters development where one sacrifices valued parts of themself the other takes and where one heals one helps. The author did a great job of writing a high energy story that keeps you hooked from page one. Do I love what the characters do all the time? No, but I respect their journey and love their story.

- opposites attract
- rockstar
- mental health rep
- therapy
- violence on page
- he falls first / harder
- insta lust
- curvy fmc
- drug use

This was a fast-paced love. The story was emotional. It wasn't all rainbows being with a rockstar. There were ups and downs, and i loved that from the beginning of their relationship, Sadie chose him and didn't give up. Throughout the story, we go through what it was like for her to love Ben Cooper. Ben the rockstar with intermittent explosive disorder, Ben the addict, Ben the husband, and the Ben that swept her off her feet.

*thank you to NetGalley for gifting this ARC to me*

This was such a quick, heart wrenching but also beautiful read. Bad-boy rockstar falls for the good girl and when I say fall, I mean tumbles and breaks his neck in love with her. I was rooting for them the whole time and teared up towards the end thinking the worst.
CC, this book was beautiful and I loved every second of it!

This was a great story. I love rockstar romance and all of the angst and turmoil that tends to go with that. Coupled with Sadie being so sweet and such an innocent girl (prior to meeting Ben, of course), this story had everything I love.

Ben and Sadie were a bit insta, but he just knew the moment he set eyes on her that she was it. I hated all of the moments that he ended up needing to apologize for, but those were to be expected with a character like Ben. He had a traumatic history and didn't deal with things the right way a lot of times.

Though the story itself was fantastic and kept me interested, the writing itself didn't really capture me. I felt like it didn't do justice to what could have been a much more emotional reading experience. Overall, an enjoyable book!

This was “instalove” on steroids. Not kidding, I blinked at 8% and MMC had the FMC on lockdown already. Unfortunately I needed a bit more time to invest in these two so that when the angst hit, I’d have an appropriate reaction. I love a good rock star trope, the sex, drugs and rock and roll were all a part of Ben Coopers life, but he also had a darkness to his past. Our FMC came off a bit too naive and her purity was thrown out the window just as quickly as the love at first sight.
Next book is Nick and I’m invested enough in the supporting cast to care where they end up, so it’s a definite read going forward.

NetGalley allowed me a copy in return for my thoughts.

CC Monroe masterfully weaves a story of love, lust, loss, and maybe a little bit of betrayal. Sadie and Ben are two of the most different people in the world, and one could never imagine that they would get together. But in this story, we see how each of these people evolve, sacrifice for the other, and eventually come out on the other end stronger for it. This book threw me for a loop, but I enjoyed every moment. The spice was amazing...keeping things steamy, while the story will keep you hooked and turning the page until you reach the end. This is one book that I will gladly read again and again.

-If you’re anything like me, a book has to get me hooked in on the first chapter or else I won’t read it. Unfortunately, this book did not do that so I kind of put it off a little bit. But finally, I decided to power through it and it wasn’t until the fourth chapter that I really got hooked. And I’m so glad I got there because this book is good!
-I love the pacing of Ben and Sadie’s relationship and how fast it moves. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t like slow burns or all the BS that comes before the MC‘s get together lol. But I do think the overall pacing of the storyline could have been slowed down a bit and not as rushed.
-I really liked how this book talks about Ben’s mental health and addiction issues. I don’t read too many books about that so that was a really good touch. Also I like that it shows how Ben becomes so addicted to Sadie, and how it is to be with an addict. This book is definitely takes you on an emotional journey.
-The bad boy/good girl trope is awesome and I love Ben’s tragic past with Sadie’s not so tragic past mixed together. It’s definitely the ultimate opposites attract couple. The spice was really good. 4/5🌶️

-Now there are definitely a few things that could be worked on, like Ben and Sadie’s cringy words. Some of the things they said to each other made me get secondhand embarrassment. And I really did not like how Ben kept referring to Sadie‘s virginity as her “innocence”. I think there could’ve been a better way to phrase that. It just sounded creepy a couple times.

-I do know this book has been updated from the original and I did notice a writing style change within the last 10 chapters and it definitely got way better in those chapters. But I do think some of the beginning/middle chapters should be worked on a bit. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone! And I can’t wait to see it on store shelves!

‼️ Warning: Loving Ben Cooper will rip you to shreds, break your heart, make you cry, and then put you back together again. ‼️ First off, LBC is 1 of my top 5 books for 2025. 5 ⭐️. As soon as I started reading Sadie & Ben’s story, I couldn’t put it down. It had a chokehold on me from beginning to end, and I wish it wasn’t over. 🖤🫶🏻😭😍🥰
Throughout the entirety of LBC, I have never felt more seen. I AM SADIE, a grade-A people pleaser to the core, always sacrificing and putting others first without a second thought. You have an incredible way of writing a story with characters that I have always connected to on some level. LBC is different. I related to Sadie more than I ever thought, down to my core. From the way to she loves without boundaries, aims to fix every problem possible, sacrifices her wants and needs for others, and seeing everything wrong and wanting to take all on so the other person doesn’t suffer. You have written such a beautiful and broken story within LBC, and to me, nobody could have written it better. You captured such beauty in the brokenness. I know that I felt seen for the first time in years, and I’m sure that there will be many others who feel the same. LBC captured the reality of what it is like to struggle with addiction and being a people pleaser, and it was done so beautifully and realistically.I can’t thank you enough for writing LBC. Sadie’s fear is my fear -- that I’ll never be enough, scared to be broken down and not able to survive and pick up the pieces. LBC has reminded me that it’s okay to still have broken pieces that need to be fixed and sometimes you have to burn everything just to rebuild something better. 🖤🥰😭😍

1/5 stars

DNF-ed at 18%

I usually finish all the books I start—in fact, I make efforts to read them to the end no matter how badly I want to put them down. Only in rare cases do I DNF, and this just had to be one of them.

I'm sorry, I just couldn't. This was literally a good girl bad boy trope written in the tropiest of the tropes, made so clear and evident from the beginning. Their dynamic is so forced, random, rushed, and blatantly unrealistic, and I could basically predict the plotline as I read along.

Both the characters are extremely one-dimensional, feeling more like puppets than actual human beings. Ben and Sadie seem drawn to each other in physical manners more so than emotional . . . except literally a day after they meet they've (somehow) already become emotionally attached to one another. They haven't even had an actual conversation??

There is a book for every person and a person for every book. Unfortunately, in this case, it was neither.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Ben and Sadie

Such a roller coaster ride of emotions. There were definitely times when I both loved and hated these characters. By the end, I loved them both.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! It offered a refreshing change for me from CC. I was introduced to her through her captivating darker Mafia romance. This was just as compelling! The writing was exceptional, and the story engaged me completely. The spice was truly spicy!

This was an emotional journey for these characters. CC did a wonderful job of weaving it together to where you could feel the angst, emotional scars, and love. She did a wonderful job of piecing their story together.

Well worth the tears. 5 star read. 4 🌶️on spice

The names threw me off at first because family names, but that’s a me issue lol.
Anyways, Loving Ben Cooper…omg this book was BEAUTIFULLY written! I could relate to it in ways I didn’t think I would. I cried so much through this book (and I don’t cry often with reading) but CC is a master when it comes to words. This…this book is a work of art, a masterpiece.
HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!!
The plot was 5/5🌟!
The spice was 5/5🌟!
Everything was 5 Stars for me! 💖

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/ 🌶️🌶️

I cannot express enough how much I love Ben and Sadie! Their story is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet infused with the raw realities of childhood trauma, substance abuse, young love, and the struggle to find oneself while navigating the expectations of others.

CC masterfully crafts a heartbreaking yet beautifully authentic narrative that explores what it means to love someone who is still on the path to finding grace. The emotional depth of the characters is astounding, making their journey feel intimate and deeply personal. From their inner monologues to their moments of self-discovery, every element of this novel resonates with truth and sincerity.

The fast-paced storytelling keeps you hooked from beginning to end, while the character growth ensures that this is more than just a love story—it’s a testament to resilience, healing, and self-acceptance. This book will stay with me forever, holding a special place in my heart and soul. A must-read for those who appreciate raw, emotionally driven storytelling! Please check trigger warnings first.

Where do I start with Loving Ben Cooper?!?

PLEASE CHECK YOUR TRIGGERS! YOUR MENTAL HEALTH IS VERY IMPORTANT!

Now, Ben and Sadie's story I went into this book very blind it's a good girl meets and Rockstar bad boy! Took me three days to finish because of work and there was a trigger in this book that took me back to bad memories but after I got through the trigger, I was okay to finish this book I need to see where Ben and Sadie ended up! I laughed, I cried, I was VERY mad, and I fell in love with both characters so much! This book will forever hold a special place in my heart, and I will recommend this over and over! This book is so beautifully written, and I love it so much 5/5 stars!!

To CC: Thank you for writing such a powerful and beautiful book that I will love forever and will keep with me! This book has opened my eyes in so many ways and I'm so glad I'm not alone in this life.

This book has completely ripped my soul and put it back together again 🖤

Ben and Sadie’s story is one of young love. Ben is living the rockstar life; parties, girls, and drugs. But when he spots Sadie in the crowd of his concert, it’s game over. Sadie and Ben have this compelling connection right from the start, but their relationship soon takes a toxic turn.

Ben is an addict and struggling with what that means. The only person that can truly save him is Sadie. These two characters go through so much pain, yet one thing stays true, they are determined to go through it together.

Loving Ben Cooper is a story everyone needs to read. Ben and Sadie’s story had me crying, laughing, sobbing, then healed my soul. CC truly depicts what it feels like to be lost then found, and how one person can change your life for the better. Forever grateful to have discovered another story that left a mark on my heart ✨