This is a young adult contemporary romance taking place in Cherokee, North Carolina.

Ace McAllister's gambler father takes Ace, her alcoholic mother, her autistic little brother, and her mother's best friend (with family) on vacation to a casino resort outside a Cherokee reservation. The only person Ace's age who she knows is her mom's friend's son Cameron, who Ace's mom wants her to spend time with but who Ace detests.

John Spears is a young Cherokee man working at the Adventure Center outside the reservation. Living with his single mom, his siblings, and some extended family in a house ruled by the family matriarch, grandmother Elisi, isn't always easy. Elisi has a lot off old fashioned beliefs, including a hereditary distrust of white people. Which wasn't a problem for John until he met Ace.

This is a sweet forbidden romance story that will surely make you smile, and even if you don't think the characters always do the right things you will still be rooting for them. The sweet romance takes a psychological suspense thriller turn in the last quarter with a twist you won't see coming, which in my opinion is a nice change of pace but may not appeal to all sweet romance readers. The only drawbacks to the story in my opinion are 1) that these young people are rather promiscuous and there is some amount of innuendo not appropriate for many YA readers and 2) that a good amount of modern slang and acronyms were used in the telling of the story, much of which I didn't understand. ( )