Review: Shut Out by Kody Keplinger

Shut Out
Kody Keplinger
Publisher: Poppy
Publish Date: September 5, 2011
Hardcover {p.273}
Source: Publisher
Genre: Young Adult
Characters: Melissa Daniels, Cash Sterling
Challenge: 100+, YA Romance
Buy the Book: Amazon

Most high school sports teams have rivalries with other schools. At Hamilton High, it's a civil war: the football team versus the soccer team. And for her part, Lissa is sick of it. Her quarterback boyfriend, Randy, is always ditching her to go pick a fight with the soccer team or to prank their locker room. And on three separate occasions Randy's car has been egged while he and Lissa were inside, making out. She is done competing with a bunch of sweaty boys for her own boyfriend's attention.

Lissa decides to end the rivalry once and for all: she and the other players' girlfriends go on a hookup strike. The boys won't get any action from them until the football and soccer teams make peace. What they don't count on is a new sort of rivalry: an impossible girls-against-boys showdown that hinges on who will cave to their libidos first. And Lissa never sees her own sexual tension with the leader of the boys, Cash Sterling, coming.

Lissa is in a relationship with Randy, who she's not exactly in love with, more like comfortable. Her family loves him, or at least likes him, so I think that's what keeps her with him. So when he goes a bit to far with the rivalry he and the rest of the football team has with the soccer team, she decides a sex strike is in order.

She manages to get all the girlfriends of both teams on board, but what she doesn't expect is for Cash Sterling to be the ringleader for the boys. These two obviously have major chemistry, but neither seems to want to be the first one to open up and tell the other how they feel.

Cash is a really great guy who genuinely cares for Lissa. Whereas Randy, he's just all about sex. He came across as a bit dense and caring only about himself. I was surprised to see Lissa with someone like him. It left me wondering how these two get together in the first place.

As far as secondary characters go, I loved Chloe. She said and did whatever she pleased and didn't care what others said or thought about her. Ellen too was a pleasant surprise. She wasn't at all what I expecting her to be. She was a strong one too, she just didn't express it in the manner in which Chloe chose to.

Another great read by Kody.