Forsyth U Made Me Miss Toxic College Football Boys

Old Money, New Girl, Same Story (But Somehow It Works Anyway)

Here’s the setup, stripped down: a girl without the right last name lands at Forsyth University, a school basically run by a handful of legacy families who treat the football program like a monarchy. There’s a golden boy who is supposed to be the heir to all of it, there’s the girl who isn’t supposed to look at him twice, and there is an ocean of old-money smugness sitting between them that the book wants you to find both repulsive and completely magnetic. It absolutely does not invent the wheel here. If you have read literally any “poor girl at a rich kid school” book in the last decade, you know the shape of this before you crack the spine.

And yet. Lawson and Rue know exactly what they’re doing with pacing, which is the thing that saves it. The reveal of just how deep the rot goes at Forsyth doesn’t happen in chapter two, it gets doled out in these little acid drops, a comment here, a favor called in there, until you realize the football royalty premise isn’t just a cute marketing hook, it’s actually somewhat sinister. That’s the smartest choice the book makes and I didn’t expect to say that about something with this cover.

Where It Sings, Where It Sags

Look, I have to be honest about the middle third, because it drags. There’s a stretch where the will-they-won’t-they gets stretched so thin I could see through it, scene after scene of charged eye contact and nothing actually happening, and I found myself skimming dialogue tags just to get to the next plot beat. If you’ve read enough of this genre you’ll clock exactly which scenes are filler and which ones matter, and here roughly one in three matters.

But when it lands, it lands hard. There’s a scene at a party, the kind every one of these books has to have, where our heroine gets cornered by the golden boy’s inner circle and instead of playing the moment for cheap menace, the book lets her be genuinely scared and genuinely furious at the same time, and that combination felt more real than half the “strong female lead” moments I’ve read in books that are trying much harder to be taken seriously. The banter, too, is better than it has any right to be. These two co-write in a way where you can’t see the seams, which is rarer than people think in dual-author books.

Here’s my tangent, because I have to say it somewhere: I think I’m getting soft on the “rich boy learns to be less awful” arc in a way that would have embarrassed me in my twenties. I used to think these books were regressive, that they were teaching women to wait around for men to unlearn cruelty. I still kind of think that. And I still read three of these books this year. Make of that what you will, I’m not going to pretend I’ve resolved it.

The weak spot, the one I can’t wave off, is the parents. Every adult in this book is either conveniently absent or a cartoon villain twirling a mustache made of trust fund money, and a book this interested in legacy and inheritance could have done so much more with the actual people handing down the rot. Instead they’re furniture. That’s a real miss, not a nitpick.

The scariest kind of power is the kind that gets called tradition.

If you want to actually own a copy instead of relying on Kindle Unlimited (which is honestly the smarter move here, this is a series you’ll want to binge in physical order), you can find it here on Amazon.

About Angel Lawson and Samantha Rue

Angel Lawson and Samantha Rue are two authors who write together so seamlessly that trying to guess who wrote which line is a losing game, which is the highest compliment I can give a co-writing team. Lawson has a long backlist of her own in YA and new adult with a soft spot for damaged, morally gray boys, and Rue brings the same energy from her solo contemporary romance work. Together under this particular partnership they’ve built out an entire Forsyth U universe with sequels and spinoffs, which tells you the readership wanted more time in this world, rot and all, and the two of them were more than happy to keep the lights on.

If This Wrecked You, Read These Next

“Sweet Little Lies” by whichever dark-academia-adjacent author you haven’t burned out on yet, for more legacy-family menace dressed up as romance. Elle Kennedy’s hockey books, if you want the same campus-royalty energy but funnier and less brooding. Anything in the Ivy Years series by Sarina Bowen if the sports-world class divide is what actually hooked you, not the football specifically. And if the parents-as-villains thing bothered you like it bothered me, try a book that actually gives the older generation a spine, like “The Wife Upstairs” for a completely different genre with the same rich-family-secrets itch.

For your book club

1. Do you think the book actually critiques the “royalty” system at Forsyth, or does it end up glamorizing the very thing it claims to expose?
2. Was the slow burn earned, or did the middle third feel like padding to you too?
3. What would the book have gained if even one parent had been written as a real, complicated person instead of a villain or a ghost?
4. Did the heroine’s anger at the party scene feel more honest to you than her romantic scenes? Why or why not?
5. Would you have made the same choice she does in the final act, knowing what she knows by then?