Elle Kennedy, a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author, has never written a bad book, in my opinion. I had read her last series, “Off Campus”, which is a series that follows a group of hockey players falling in love with different girls, and I was instantly captivated by her writing. When I heard she was starting a new series, I knew I had to read it.

“Misfit” is the first book in her new Prep series and takes place at one of the most elite schools in New Hampshire, Sandover Prep, and follows a group of seniors navigating their last year of high school.

Remington John (RJ) Shaw discovers his mother is marrying a wealthy man he has never met. He is immediately sent to Sandover, a prep school for rich male delinquents, alongside his new stepbrother, Fennelly Bishop. 

RJ is a loner. This is due to his mother’s constantly revolving door of boyfriends and the numerous moving trips. He never saw the point in making friends, but everything changes when he meets Sloane Trescott.

Sloane is the headmaster’s daughter and is off-limits to all students, but RJ decides to break that rule, as he becomes determined to win her over after meeting her once. However, Sloane recently went through a rough breakup and is only focusing on her final year of high school and forgetting about boys for once.

The story follows multiple points of view, which can be difficult to follow along with and risks creating a sloppy plot, but I thought Kennedy did an amazing job flowing between the different perspectives.

I’m used to romance books following the two love interests. However, this book decided to take an interesting twist and followed not only the love interests but also some of the side characters within the story.

I was worried that it would make the book feel drawn out with boring perspectives of side characters, but every character had amazing stories to tell in their chapters. I found myself constantly wanting more, no matter which character’s point of view I was reading.

With the chapters changing their perspective so often I found myself always ready to turn the next page. The whole story was very fast-paced, but it never felt like I couldn’t keep up.

With that, I really enjoyed and fell in love with the characters.

I feel like with any book, it is crucial to have characters that the reader can either fall in love with or relate to, and I think this book was able to execute both of these ideas. For me, my favorite character was Sloane. I not only fell in love with her development, but I was also able to relate to her.

Sloane comes off as this girl who is untouchable and has to be everyone’s rock or the person they can depend on, but deep down she wants to be cared for as well. She is the oldest in her family, and after her mother’s passing and her younger sister’s car accident, she is forced to take the role of a motherly figure to her sister, but also keep the house running. Over the years, She has buried her emotions down to care for others and has never made herself a priority, which I feel like a lot of people can relate to, but I personally really resonated with her.

I also loved how throughout the book Sloane had a lot of walls built up and never let her guard down until she met RJ. RJ was able to drag out a lot of Sloane’s authentic personality throughout the book and that is one of my favorite dynamics to read. Having a character that has built a lot of walls around their heart and then seeing them slowly get knocked down by the love interest is always adorable. Especially in this case when both RJ and Sloane had a lot of trust issues and had a hard time being vulnerable. It was great to see them slowly develop feelings for each other and realize they were vulnerable enough to fall in love.

Overall, this book had amazing characters and romance that made my heart melt. RJ and Sloane were able to knock each other’s walls down and get to know who they both really were, creating a strong bond with one another. Besides the characters and the romance, the plot was fast-paced and always kept me interested, and the book ended on a massive cliffhanger, so I can’t wait to see where Elle Kennedy takes the rest of the books in this series.