With love, sometimes the trick’s on you.
Darcy Wright is off to Harvard Medical School, never having told her family that she’s a lesbian or her very straight best friend, Taylor, that she’s in love with her. Ready to start the next chapter in her life, she’s found an apartment with a roommate within walking distance of her classes, but nothing could have prepared her for Olivia Boyd.
Olivia has rules upon rules and opinions about everything. She makes no effort to hide her disdain for Darcy as soon as she meets her and is shocked to find Darcy sitting in the same class at school. As months go by, they settle into a rhythm of barely tolerating each other until Taylor drops the ultimate bomb on Darcy: she has a girlfriend and thinks she’s in love. All seems to be lost until a miscommunication makes Taylor think Olivia is Darcy’s girlfriend and Olivia agrees to come home with her for Thanksgiving and act the part of the her devoted lover.
Tricky Wisdom is the most delicious thawing the ice queen romance. Olivia is off-putting right from the get-go, and yet she (very) slowly warms up as she gets used to Darcy and grows to respect her intelligence. Because the story is told in the first person from Darcy’s perspective, we learn everything about Olivia through her words and how Darcy perceives her actions. Her quirks, like how much she adores Harry Potter, are cute and keep her human while we wait for her to open up and trust Darcy. We’re not left lacking in knowing who Olivia is as a person, however, because when she opens up to Darcy, she lets it all out and it’s beautiful to see.
Darcy is likeable and easygoing, and she makes for a compelling character because she’s definitely not perfect. As smart as she is in the classroom, she’s not the best at reading cues from Taylor or Olivia and she doesn’t see how much Olivia changes until way after the reader does. This works well because Tricky Wisdom is a new adult romance, balancing the sexiness and romantic tension of contemporary romance with the youthful concerns of people who haven’t launched fully into adulthood yet. It has a fabulous first kiss scene that reminds us that there’s something to the adage “if at first you don’t succeed…”
Tricky Wisdom is the first in a series, and it covers all of Darcy and Olivia’s first year in medical school. If you love it as much as I did, you can jump right to its sequel, Tricky Chances, which covers their next three years and is just as good, if not better. It goes even deeper into who Olivia and Darcy are, lets us revisit side characters from Tricky Wisdom and even introduces a couple of new ones for us to love. Olivia and Darcy are a fabulous couple and I hope they and their friends and family have books and books to come.