Until It Fades by K. A. Tucker

To be published on June 27, 2017 by Atria Books

Source: eARC for review from publisher

Plot Summary for Until It Fades by K.A. Tucker

Twenty-four-year-old truck stop waitress and single mother Catherine Wright has simple goals: to give her five-year-old daughter a happy life and to never again be the talk of the town in Balsam, Pennsylvania: population two thousand outside of tourist season.

And then one foggy night, on a lonely road back from another failed attempt at a relationship, Catherine saves a man’s life. 

It isn’t until after the police have arrived that Catherine realizes exactly who it is she has saved: Brett Madden, hockey icon and media darling. Catherine has already had her fifteen minutes of fame and the last thing she wants is to have her past dragged back into the spotlight, only this time on a national stage. 

But when she finds the man she saved standing on her doorstep, desperate to thank her, all that changes. What begins as an immediate friendship quickly turns into something neither of them expected. Something that Catherine isn’t sure she can handle; something that Catherine is afraid to trust. 

Because how long can an extraordinary man like Brett be interested in an ordinary woman like Catherine…before the spark fades?

Review of Until It Fades by K. A. Tucker

K. A. Tucker says in her acknowledgements for this New Adult romance that some people might consider Until It Fades a trope-y book. I am one of those people. 

If a celebrity romance book and a Harlequin single parent story had a baby, it would be this book ... but I'm not saying that's a bad thing! 

Tucker also calls Until It Fades "light (for me.)" I agree that this is much less angsty than her prior titles.

Catherine -- a waitress and single mom who has overcome a lot of hate in her small town after a high school affair with a popular teacher that got him arrested --is driving home after a bad blind date when she comes across a car that's smoldering after a recent accident. She calls 911 and drags the surviving victim to safety.

Unbeknownst to her, the man she saved is a hockey star and the son of a movie star (covering all the celebrity bases here...) 

Catherine, fearful of media attention after being slut-shamed by town gossips years ago, doesn't want to be identified to the press or to the hunky guy she saved, who is not only gorgeous but seems desperate to thank her.

Until It Fades was fun to read. I'm a big fan of most romance novel tropes, but interestingly, I thought this book would have been fine without many of them. 

The book keeps flashing back to Catherine's past. I didn't think was necessary to do that quite so much, as for me it slowed the action down in the present. It also slowed down the romance - this is definitely the slow-burn kind and more PG-13 than her prior books.

The story puts a bunch of obstacles between these two: her fear of notoriety, her fear of another heartbreak, her child, his fame, her strict parents, their differences in social class. 

To but to me the strongest parts of the book were just a few of these obstacles: her fear of being used and discarded by him and his gratitude to her and fear that his accident will end his career. 

At times I wished the book had spent more time on the emotional connection between them rather than having her obsess about her past quite so much.

Still, this is a great summer read. If you like slow burn, hunky hockey stars, and single parent romances, definitely give this a try!