Rachel Lynn Solomon (Weather Girl; The Ex Talk) has written a realistic and entertaining age-gap romance in Extracurricular. Ramona Wilder is a former teen actress and pop star who left the music industry for good at age 26, exhausted by the pace and the public eye. Now that she's being "normal," Ramona decides to go to college since she didn't have the chance when she was younger. She enrolls in the psychology class of 36-year-old, recently divorced Nick Navarro. Although Nick intends to continue his easy, breezy professorial ways in spite of his celebrity student, he has to admit Ramona is getting under his skin.
Solomon skillfully navigates the trickiness of the difference in Nick's and Ramona's ages, made more challenging by the power imbalance of the professor-student relationship. Because Ramona is in her 20s and the gap is only a decade--and because she is unbelievably famous--the dynamics are more balanced than they would be otherwise. Solomon handles the ramifications thoughtfully, and readers will root for Nick and Ramona to find their happily-ever-after.
Sure to appeal to fans of the movie Notting Hill, Extracurricular is a playfully enjoyable read. It has emotional heft as the characters explore their mental health, including an anxiety disorder, but it never loses the fun aspect of its celebrity-dating-a-normal-person premise. A robust cast of side characters--including Nick's precocious teenage niece, who just happens to be obsessed with Ramona's music, and Betty Zhu, Ramona's intense personal trainer--rounds out this lovely romance, perfect for readers of Ashley Poston or B.K. Borison. --Jessica Howard, former bookseller, freelance book reviewer