Name: Saving 6
Series: Boys of Tommen #3
Author: Chloe Walsh
Publisher: Piatkus
Format: Kindle
Genres: Upper YA, Contemporary, Sports Romance
Spice Rating: 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Rating:
Synopsis: Goodreads
He’s a boy who’s lost. She’s girl who might just be the home he’s never had.
The second born son in a broken marriage, Joey Lynch has spent a lifetime picking up the pieces of a family unravelling. When his older brother Darren skips town, twelve-year-old Joey finds himself thrown into the role of protector to his younger siblings and mother. Plagued by self-loathing, and furious with the world, he grapples with teenage life, his unwavering sense of duty to his family, while balancing precariously close to a life of addiction that threatens to swallow him whole. The only light in his sea of darkness is his boss’s firecracker of a daughter who refuses to back down. A girl who just so happens to be his classmate.
Aoife Molloy has never been backwards in coming forward. Her bubbly and self-assured nature has never led her astray. Until her first day of secondary school when she collides with a hot-headed boy who sparks a burning curiosity inside of her that only grows stronger by the day.
Falling into a complicated friendship with her father’s apprentice, Aoife works to unravels the secrets around Joey Lynch’s life – while he desperately fights to keep her out.
Review:
Saving 6 is the third book in Chloe Walsh’ Boys of Tommen Series. There are a lot of rough topics discussed and suggested meaning the author recommends this for an audience of 18+ despite it being marketed as YA. I have put Upper YA for that reason. Please read the authors warnings before going into this book / series. And as always, spoilers for Saving 6 would be hidden, but there may be spoilers for the previous books in the series.
Whilst reading Keeping 13, I knew that we were switching to Joey’s story next and I was simultaneously worried, nervous and hopeful about Joey’s story… Because at the ending Keeping 13 we get the spark of hope that maybe things can be turned around for him. Maybe. And I really want that for him. I love Johnny and Shannon, but Joey was the one I was immediately concerned about given that he’s the oldest brother present. So, I went into his story hoping for the best, fearing the worst…
Saving 6, I’m pleased to say, was not as rough of an emotional time as Binding 13 and Keeping 13. But only in the sense that I didn’t require tissues as much as the previous books… The pain however, very real. We start out with Joey’s first day at BCS where he first sees Aoife and the instant chemistry they have is adorable – I loved them. We then follow over the next multiple years through their story and it absolutely isn’t as straight forward as I had assumed based on Binding & Keeping 13.
By the end of Saving 6 there was a part of me that was slightly fed up with Aoife and Joey, but ultimately I still desperately wanted to give them a hug because even though it wasn’t as brutal as Shannon’s story (though most likely only because I’d already read Shannon’s story, if I started with Saving it would have probably hit harder), Joey being forced to age up before he was an adult was awful to read about – not to mention everything else he struggles with.
I’m nervous for Redeeming 6 now, because the timelines merging and that means that I already knew what was coming but at least with Saving 6 starting so much further back in time, I knew I had time… Now with every chapter, I know we’re getting closer and closer to Keeping 13…
As mentioned already, these books are emotional, and they do discuss hard topics, but the main group that Chloe has created already own my heart. I stand by my previous comments about the found family in this series, and whilst we didn’t see much of them in Saving 6… I expect we’re about to see a lot more of them Redeeming onwards!
I couldn’t rate Saving 6 5 stars because I did enjoy it less than Binding 13, and it suffered with the same sort of pacing issues that Keeping 13 had. The spice goes up a notch in Saving 6 because the characters are older, so be prepared for that. But I still am fully down the rabbit hole that is the Boys of Tommen series, and I’m okay with that!
“I’ve put an awful lot of effort into saving you, six.”
Reading With Tyler 
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