Daring the Bad Boy is the first book in the Endless Summer Series by Monica Murphy. Daring the Bad Boy is a young adult contemporary romance that features, you guessed it...the bad boy trope. I do love a good bad boy story, and Monica Murphy never disappoints. Her stories are always excellent! I really enjoyed Daring the Bad Boy. This book was a lot of fun.

In Daring the Bad Boy we meet our main characters, Jacob and Annie, who meet at summer camp. I do love a summer camp setting. No matter the time of year, camp automatically transports me back to hot summer days filled with swimming and flirting fun. My summer camp days never involved bad boys, but hey a girl can dream, can't she? Jacob is gets roped into helping camper Annie catch the attention of her crush Kyle, and before you know it Jacob and Annie have a thing going on themselves.

My biggest regret with the book is that I wish it was longer. This book clocks in at 150 pages, and it took me just under 1.5 hours to read, which is more of a long novella for me. The length of the book didn't allow for too much character exploration and depth to be given, which was a bit of a bummer for me. Daring the Bad Boy is perfect for when you are looking to escape into a cute summer romance. It is a super short read, and while I do wish it were longer, it was a ton of fun.

Unfortunately this book has gone in my DNF pile. It just wasn't engaging me like it would have years ago when I first requested it. My reading tastes have changed a lot over the years as I've gotten older and unfortunately some of the books requested years ago have been affected by my reading tastes and the fact that a lot of books for younger audiences haven't been grasping my attention as of late. I thank you for the opportunity to read and review this book.

3 stars... cute book. Young but cute, fun and quick read. A little too high school for me!

Daring the Bad Boy by Monica Murphy is a standalone story in the Endless Summer Series. I have to admit that I have struggled with young adult stories lately, but I am a fan of Monica Murphy's and this cover was absolutely adorable. I knew I wanted to give this one a shot when I first saw it, but unfortunately this one didn't work for me at all.

Annie is looking to break out of being the shy girl, and summer camp is exactly the way for her to do it. She sets her sights on hottie Kyle, but with her fear of water, she has no way to get close to him since that is where he likes to hang out. When a game of truth or dare ropes counselor Jacob into teaching Annie how to swim, he knows that he has to be careful since the camp has a strict no fraternization policy for campers and counselors. But soon Annie wants to learn more than just how to swim and Jacob and Annie find themselves doing more than just swimming together. But if they are caught, Jake could find himself in trouble, ruining everything between them.

I have to admit that a lot of my issues here were the characters. Annie was sweet at first, and while I didn't love her I did like her. But then it seemed like she had a massive personality swap and she suddenly became this brat that I couldn't stand. She seemed to go crazy, and I just didn't understand what had happened to her. It felt forced, as though the author was trying to inject drama into the story that would have already been there anyways. It just felt unnecessary and I couldn't get behind it at all. Jake was okay. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't great. I was just not invested in them, and while they had a cute romance it wasn't anything unique or special.

I also felt like the story itself had a lot of issues. Besides things feeling forced at times, the story was choppy. Things seemed to skip around a lot, with time seeming off. There were times that I didn't know how much time had passed and it seems like we were missing things. There was also way more tell than show here, and I wanted to see things happen rather than just have the author tell us. It wasn't a naturally flowing story, and the whole thing just came off as contrived. Unfortunately as much as I wanted to like this one, it just never got there for me and when Annie's personality suddenly became so out of character I was just skimming to finish at that point. I have read and loved YA stories and stories from Monica Murphy, but this wasn't one of them and isn't one that I would recommend.

This was a fun and light read by Monica Murphy. It was a nice change up reading about characters that are much younger, and still in high school. Annie was so cute and innocent, I wanted to reach into the book and tell her that she was still appealing and a great person as she is! She didn't need to try and be someone else. However, I did like how she was willing to try something new, go to summer camp, and put herself outside of her comfort zone to try and meet new people and have new experiences.

I also loved Jacob's character. He reminded me of quite a few boys I knew. They wanted to appear tough and impenetrable, but on the inside were still very caring people that wanted to do good.

Watching the two of them learn to open up, connect and get together was so fun. Made me wish that I had been able to attend a summer camp when I was younger! Jealous! Great book, and I was so happy to have read it!

A nice read. I got annoyed with Annie towards the end, but I liked Jake!