A review by kaydanielsromance
Shameless King by Maya Hughes

4.0

Shameless King picks up with Declan and Makenna now a few years later in their senior year of college.
Mak originally went to Stanford, but due to her father falling ill, she has transferred back to Philadelphia to attend her senior year at the local college, where Declan also happens to attend. He is her one fly in the ointment to a perfect senior year considering he was relentless in giving her hell back in prep school. She just needs to avoid him and her year will be golden.
Declan just needs to make it through his last year of college and he will be set for the future in the NHL. He only has one minor problem. He now has to retake a sophomore class and until he passes it he's off the team. Oh, and the other big problem, Makenna Halstead is his partner and has the one opportunity to screw up his entire future.
Until Mak can see Declan as anything other than a knuckle-dragging caveman and until Declan can prove he actually is trustworthy and won't screw up Mak's perfect GPA, these two need to put aside their differences and work together to get through the semester. Once they do they might actually enjoy it.

What I liked about this book; things are never what they seem and the grass is never greener on the other side of the fence. We are all familiar with these phrases, yet, no matter how hard we try to let down our defenses, we all still wear a mask. Whatever the reasons; to keep people out, to keep people in, to keep up appearances, whatever wall we build there is a reason "to keep" a perimeter around our heart and that grass we think is so green on the other side of the fence is really just turf.
Mak and Declan eventually break through those walls, but this entire series is built on the notion of kids all attending a rich preparatory school, but a few of those kids, like Declan, were in fact not rich. It made for an interesting dynamic to his story.
I'm excited to read the rest of this series and see how the rest of the Kings fare in their coming years.