It’s all about perspective and interpretation. She was a fighter, her battles from her teenage years shaping her relationships as an adult.

We felt that the strength of character rested with Nellie. Can anyone say, “enemies with benefits?!” There were moments when Cal’s story broke our hearts… “Tell me what you hate about me.” So heart-breaking what spurred on these questions. It gave us a perspective of the how and why’s of this intense chemistry that spurred on an almost hostile relationship that had fiery passionate consequences. We loved how we jumped into the high school past of Cal and Nellie through diary entries. And it was only a matter of time before he’d break it.’ That is until that moment of revelation when we realised that we loved and understood them both respectively. One second, we were on Nellie’s side, the next on Cal’s. Our affection for Nellie and Cal was akin to a game of table tennis. That dramatic push-pull attraction we all know and love. This Author sure knows how to write character tension. It is a fabulous mix of enemies to lovers and small-town romance. We say toxic but really that is just the top layer of their connection. The Bully is about the complex and slightly toxic ‘relationship’ -spanning years- between Nellie Rivera and Cal Stark. ‘If Nellie deemed me unworthy, it would destroy me.’ The wonderful thing that has come out of this is that we loved The Bully and it completely stood on its own, we met some great characters and, we’ve now got three books in this series to add to our kindles. However, we were in a huge book funk, so we went for it. we know, we should have started from the beginning and yes, we are normally sticklers for reading in order, despite being a series of standalones.

The Bully by Willa Nash (Devney Perry) is the first book we have read in the Calamity Montana series. ‘The walls we’d built as shields were so thick that it was hard to see where mine ended and his began.’

The bully willa nash read online