A Brush With Love
By: Mazey Eddings
March 1, 2022 St Martin’s Griffin
336 pages
Review by: E Broderick
There were several flavors of science major in undergrad – the small few that were planning on academic research careers, those hoping to go into pharma and industry, and a large contingent of premed and nursing students. Each of these groups had their own little fiefdoms, but cross talk was common, especially when it came to dating. It was not uncommon for a premed to be in a serious relationship with a chemistry PhD hopeful and for the geologists to swap notes with the biotech bros. It was a happy little mash up of nerds. And then there were the dental students. For some reason, I could pick them out of a crowd easily and they never seemed to fully mesh in with the other groups. So when I heard that Mazey Edding’s debut adult romance, A Brush With Love, featured a Jewish dental student hoping to be an oral maxillofacial surgeon, I was game to dive in and get an in depth look at one of these mysterious creatures.
The dental student in question, Harper, is top of her class, has a crew of friends in the health sciences, and also suffers from rip roaring anxiety. As a senior, she is poised to match into her choice of oral maxillofacial residency programs, the result of years of hard work. All of this careful planning is turned upside when she meets freshman dental student Dan, who is what graduate programs refer to as a “non traditional” student, because he took several years off to work in finance before returning to complete his dental education. It rapidly becomes clear that Dan is way more interested in Harper than he is in dentistry. In fact, he has only enrolled in dental school because after the passing of his famous, but verbally abusive, dentist father his mother needs his help in running the family dental practice.
Harper and Dan flirt in the most unlikely of places – including the dental lab while making plaster molds of teeth. It is clear that this book is written by someone who, like Harper, has a passion for dentistry. It is therefore impressive that Dan’s misgivings are given equal weight and the reader is allowed to feel Dan’s ambivalence towards being bullied into a dental career just as much as we experience Harper’s anxiety that this relationship is throwing off the career trajectory that she has dreamed about since she was young. We witness a full blown anxiety/panic attack from Harper as well as some of the harsher memories that Dan has of his father. These subjects are handled delicately and they provide much nuance to the characters.
The banter in this book is fast and furious, however it relied on a little too many double entendres and crass humor for my taste. This is not because the jokes and wit are poorly done. In fact, they all land exactly as they are meant to and this obviously took a significant amount of skill. It will be appreciated by the right reader. I just happen to prefer a different style for humor (which is ironic in the extreme since I prefer high heat in terms of the physical aspects of the relationship). Which brings to my only other quibble with the book. There is a scene that involves a fight that gets physical between Dan and some of the other dental students that harass Harper. I was so very desirous of seeing Dan as a knight in shining armor, and I adored his willingness to step up for Harper, but I wish this hadn’t descended into unnecessary physical violence and that Dan hadn’t been the one to escalate it to that level. I just don’t find that sexy, although I know many people do and will love this scene.
Speaking of reader preferences – this seems a good place to insert my usual description of the books heat level. There are 1-2 explicit m/f sex scenes that are not safe for work.
By the end of the book, I felt like I did learn something about those mysterious dental students, but I also learned something about anxiety disorders, as well as how someone like Harper – who is proud of being Jewish but is not particularly desirous of a daily religious practice – expresses her identity. It was fun to spend some time in her world but also at times scary and even inspiring. She’s a wonderful character and I thought her well-roundness was the strength of this romance.