The Season
By: Jonah Lisa Dyer & Stephen Dyer
Published Year: 2017
Publisher: Viking Children's
Pages: 346
Summary (Provided by Goodreads): Megan McKnight is a soccer star with Olympic dreams, but she’s not a girly girl. So when her Southern belle mother secretly enters her in the 2016 Dallas debutante season, she’s furious—and has no idea what she’s in for. When Megan’s attitude gets her on probation with the mother hen of the debs, she’s got a month to prove she can ballroom dance, display impeccable manners, and curtsey like a proper Texas lady or she’ll get the boot and disgrace her family. The perk of being a debutante, of course, is going to parties, and it’s at one of these lavish affairs where Megan gets swept off her feet by the debonair and down-to-earth Hank Waterhouse. If only she didn’t have to contend with a backstabbing blonde and her handsome but surly billionaire boyfriend, Megan thinks, being a deb might not be so bad after all. But that’s before she humiliates herself in front of a room full of ten-year-olds, becomes embroiled in a media-frenzy scandal, and gets punched in the face by another girl.
The season has officially begun…but the drama is just getting started
First Impressions
I think this book first caught my eye as a part of the Debut Author Challenge. Admittedly, I’m a sucker for books that involve soccer. Plus the addition of a debutante ball definitely caught my eye. The cover made a good first impression and definitely made me want to pick it up so it did its job.
What I thought
Megan and her twin sister Julia are signed up for the debutant ball by their mom. While Julia is excited and ready to go, Megan is less than looking forward to it. She is a college soccer player whose last thing on her mind is dressing up and acting like a lady. But when she finds out that their parents are struggling to keep the ranch, she agrees to participate in the ball per her father’s request.
I really enjoyed the beginning of the story. I liked getting to know Megan and Julia. Megan is a bit feisty but she is passionate about soccer. It was fun to see the contrast between her and her sister as well as the difficulty she has with the first debutant tea.
That’s about where I started to have some issues with the book. I’ve read a lot of romance novels and watched a lot of Hallmark movies, so maybe that’s why I had issues with this book, but it was frustratingly predictable. Right before the first tea, Megan meets a cute stranger. However, that stranger already has a girlfriend. She then meets a different guy at a different ball who she immediately falls for. But stranger number 1, doesn’t like Megan’s new guy because there’s a “history”. Now, I really hoped that Megan’s new guy, Hank, wouldn’t turn out to be evil, but (semi-spoiler) he does.
Also over time, I started to dislike Megan. She was quick to anger and definitely irrational. The development just wasn’t there for me. For example, she didn’t trust Andrew (stranger 1) at all for no reason other than he was rich. She also didn’t like one of the other debutantes for completely superficial reasons, and then changed her mind based on the party she threw. Megan turns our to be pretty shallow and self-centered and hard to like and root for.
There’s another storyline with Julia and her ex-boyfriend that I felt was seriously underdeveloped. It brought about an interesting plot point later in the book, but it was out of nowhere. I felt like some of the lack of development almost cheapened the seriousness of the issue.