It’s been a great month for those of us who eat, sleep, and breathe all things Elle Kennedy. With The Charlie Method dropping in the last week of February, and The Deal’s 10th anniversary collector’s edition announced (I have the Illumicrate special edition set, but I’m still eyeing that new one—why is being a book collector so expensive?), Briar U friends, we have been fed.
I’m a bit behind on my Elle Kennedy journey, so I actually just finished The Dixon Rule—and it immediately became one of my favorite Briar U installments. Naturally, I dove into The Charlie Method with high hopes. Unfortunately for me, while the characters and their individuality carried over my investment in the Briar U universe, the plot and central relationship didn’t quite deliver what I wanted from this story.
This post will only include my recap of the plot and my review! If you’re looking for the spicy chapter breakdown or closed-door modifications, head over to our🌶️ Charlie Method Spicy Chapters Guide🌶️.
Summary
The Charlie Method continues Elle Kennedy’s Campus Diaries series and overlaps slightly with the events of The Dixon Rule. The FMC, Charlotte “Charlie” Kingston, is a STEM student at Briar U juggling the pressure of a demanding sorority and the impossibly high standards she sets for herself. But behind the polished facade, Charlie has a secret wild side—from spontaneous hookups to racing cars in the middle of the night.
When she meets Beckett and Will, two Briar U hockey players who “like to share,” the three begin spending time together. As their bond deepens, the trio must navigate not just their growing relationship, but also the social and emotional pressures of college life.
📅 Release Date: February 25, 2025
📚 Where to Read:
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❤️ Is The Charlie Method a Why Choose / Reverse Harem Romance?
Yes! This is a contemporary Why Choose romance following Charlie, Beckett, and Will.
Characters 👥
Charlotte “Charlie” Kingston
Charlie is the FMC of The Charlie Method. She has long black hair (usually worn in a bun), dark brown eyes, and a fit, athletic build. A biomedical STEM major at Briar U, Charlie is a senior navigating the pressure of her demanding major while also managing finances for her prestigious sorority, Delta Pi, where she sits on the executive board. In Delta Pi, appearances are everything and perfection is the expectation.
Charlie, who is of Korean descent, was adopted from Seoul as a baby. Her adoption plays a significant role in her character arc—she’s internalized the belief that she must earn love through perfection, pushing herself relentlessly in school, sorority life, and relationships. But beneath her polished exterior is a wild streak—one that comes out in secret hookups and underground midnight drag racing.
Beckett Dunne
Beckett is one of the two MMCs in this book. With blonde hair and gray eyes, he brings a laid-back, carefree energy to the story. Originally from Australia, his family moved to Indiana when he was ten. Beckett studies environmental science at Briar U and plays for the hockey team.
Beckett is emotionally detached and has sworn off serious relationships after a long-term high school romance ended badly. Readers may recognize him from The Graham Effect, where he starts exploring his enjoyment of hooking up with women alongside his best friend, Will—a dynamic that carries over into The Charlie Method.
Will Larsen
Will is the other MMC—the quiet, reserved, all-American boy-next-door with brown hair and striking blue eyes. While he may appear low-key, Will is assertive when it counts. He’s the son of a high-profile congressman, who treats Will more like a campaign accessory than a son.
Will struggles with the pressure to maintain appearances and constantly distances himself from his father’s politics. His emotional depth and desire for autonomy become core themes in his storyline with Charlie and Beckett.
Plot Summary 🌀
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: The following section contains a detailed plot recap of The Charlie Method
Charlie Kingston is a senior biomed major at Briar U. Charlie has a demanding life, with her STEM major and her sorority, Delta Pi, which focuses on appearances, self-dubbing themselves as presidents’ and senators’ wives. Charlie is adopted from Seoul as a baby. Her family values achievement the most, so Charlie has made herself believe she has to earn her family’s love by being perfect and succeeding.
However, Charlie has a wild side, as the story begins with her hooking up with Isaac Grant, Briar U’s star football player, in his car. Charlie has broken off with her insecure and possessive boyfriend Mitch due to their sexual incompatibilities and is now exploring her freedom—but in secret.
Will Larsen is the all-American next-door boy of Briar U. He spent The Dixon Rule trying to find a way to conform himself into the mainstream romantic relationships of society, but he’s over that now and has accepted he’s okay with hooking up with girls alongside Beckett.
Will’s father is a congressman, and he regularly wants him to appear in campaigns and keep up appearances. Their relationship is strained, with Will wanting to be his own man and his father treating him transactionally. Will and Charlie are lab partners.
Beckett continues to be Beckett—free, chaotic, and unapologetic. He’s sworn off relationships. Beckett and Charlie do not like each other in a shared class they go to together.
Charlie signs up for an ancestry website at the beginning of the book to find any genetic relatives she might have and finds a brother. She sends him a message to meet and awaits a response.
Charlie uses a dating app that focuses on texting and comes across a profile of what appears to be two guys sharing a profile. Intrigued, she messages them and they begin texting. Charlie does not realize this is Beckett and Will’s profile.
As a member of her sorority, Charlie regularly attends meetings. She is also the person handling the financial responsibilities of her sorority, so she’s a member of the executive board. Charlie regularly clashes heads with Agatha, the sorority’s president, who cares more about appearances and what’s “unbecoming” of a Delta Pi woman. It doesn’t look like Charlie even wants to be in this sorority, as her conversations with her best friend and sorority sister Faith reveal, but she’s a legacy (her mother was a member of Delta Pi), so she sticks it out.
One of Charlie’s duties as a member of the sorority is to mentor freshmen who rush and join the sorority. Charlie’s little is Blake Logan, the daughter of John and Grace Logan. Isaac Grant continues to be interested in Blake while Blake seemingly has no interest in him—although as the book progresses, Isaac is relentless in trying to win Blake’s heart, including causing a scene to get Blake to go out with him in front of his whole sorority, and making romantic gestures on the football field. (We’re totally getting Blake and Isaac’s book next.) Blake eventually agrees, but the relationship is short-lived when Blake gets kicked out after hosting Isaac and his teammates in her room and they trash the place. (Again, TBD in the next book, I bet.)
Charlie continues sexting with Beckett and Will, getting to know them. When Blake invites Charlie to attend a Briar U hockey game, Charlie realizes Beckett Dunne and Will Larsen are on the team and makes the connection to their username (Larsen & B), realizing the guys she’s been interacting with are in fact her lab partner and another guy she can’t stand.
Sacramento University has a hockey hazing-related death, which shakes the NCAA hockey scene. Will’s father, the congressman, decides this could impact his image since his son plays hockey. He forces Will to do interviews, video features, and mouthpieces to show his son is squeaky clean, introducing Will to reporters—much to Will and his team’s dismay.
Charlie eventually tells Will that she’s the girl from the app, who tells Beckett. After some resistance and back and forth, the three of them go get a drink, ending up making out. Charlie weighs getting together with them and what that would mean for her social status, but eventually the guys wear her down and they begin hooking up. A lot. Seriously, this book is 57 chapters and 15 of them are spicy.
Charlie doesn’t get a response from her brother, but she’s being followed on campus by a guy near her age of Asian descent. Eventually, he reveals himself to be Harrison—her brother. The two of them begin to get to know one another, but Harrison is jaded and resents Charlie. He’s a freelancer living in Nevada now, but his adoptive childhood wasn’t like Charlie’s—he was abused and beaten growing up. Their relationship is strained, but they try to make it work.
Charlie applies to graduate schools while beginning a relationship with Beckett and Will. She reveals more and more of her wild side to them.
Charlie’s best friend Dante works at his father’s luxury car shop, which has a race track where Charlie races sports cars at night. It’s her moment of freedom—something she eventually shares with Beckett.
The three of them continue like this, regularly worrying about what comes next since society isn’t accepting of multiple people dating one another. They eventually become exclusive, although in secret.
Beckett’s father gets a job offer doubling his salary—but back in Australia. While Beckett and his father want to move back there, Beckett’s mother has built a life in Indiana and doesn’t want to go. Their relationship is strained, and it goes as far as his father secretly accepting the job and his mother kicking him out, leading him to stay with Beckett for a few days.
Charlie’s ex-boyfriend Mitch regularly slut-shames her throughout the book. After all, they’ve broken up because Charlie has a much higher libido than he does. At a sorority function, Charlie takes Will with her as her date but feels guilty that she didn’t bring Beckett. She steps away to call Beckett to check in with him, which Mitch overhears, and he calls her a slut. Will punches him in the face, but the rumor mill begins churning, making Charlie worry.
Will confesses his love to Charlie, which Charlie returns. She also tells Beckett she loves him, but Beckett—who has been distant all book and only wanted to be involved sexually—continues to be emotionally unavailable. It is revealed by Beckett’s father that although Beckett’s been telling everyone his ex-girlfriend Shannon cheated on him, she in fact died from leukemia in Beckett’s arms. He got tired of being pitied and decided to lie when he started at Briar U.
Beckett tells Charlie he’s afraid of losing her, which Charlie eventually wears him down on—the two of them confessing their love for one another as well.
Beckett, Will, and Charlie attend a party together as a couple, revealing their relationship to their friends. Charlie also confides in Faith about their relationship.
After Harrison visits one more time and Charlie takes him on a trail to celebrate his birthday, Harrison lashes out at Charlie about their different childhoods. Charlie gifts him her pet bunny from the orphanage she had with him all this time, and Harrison throws it over a cliff, rejecting her. Charlie drives to her parents’ home in tears, finally confessing she found her biological brother. While she was worried about her family’s response to this, they’re nothing but supportive and say they’re more than happy to welcome Harrison to their family as well. Harrison, who resented them all this time because he thought they knew about him and didn’t want him, eventually visits Charlie’s family.
It is also during this visit Charlie reveals she’s dating two boys, which leads to her brother Oliver confessing he’s getting a divorce and her sister Ava coming out. The family recalibrates, as they’ve always been about celebrating achievements. Their parents tell them they love and support them no matter what, realizing their achievement-driven family dynamics are pushing their kids into secrecy and pressure.
Beckett gets a full-time job offer to be an environmental scientist in Australia.
At the same time, Charlie gets accepted to the University of Sydney for grad school.
Will gets a job offer to be a campaign speechwriter for a critic of his father. The offer comes from the woman who interviewed him for the mouthpiece his father arranged. Will wants to accept it, but his father forbids it and disowns him.
Beckett asks Charlie to come with him. Charlie considers—but only if Will comes too. Beckett asks Will, and he hesitantly accepts.
They graduate. On the day of the move, Will realizes he’s not ready to accept their arrangement and wants to take the speechwriter job. He sort of breaks Charlie and Beckett’s hearts and stays, although he promises he’ll join them out there in November after his candidate’s run. They are devastated but leave for Australia.
Six months later, the campaign is over and Will’s candidate wins. He realizes what he’s trying to prove is not worth not being with Charlie and Beckett and flies to Australia to be with them.
In the epilogue, Charlie, Beckett, and Will are together. Charlie is in grad school, Beckett works as an ocean conservationist, and Will works for a non-profit. They have a Labrador and live happily in Australia.
Review
🧐 Overall Impressions
I wanted to love this book—I really did. Charlie felt like such a relatable character: a STEM woman trying to uphold the perfect image of herself and the world around her, with clear anxiety about whether she’s “earned” the things she has—including her parents’ love. I was excited about Will’s all-American boy-next-door energy and Beckett’s nonchalant surfer-boy-meets-hockey-player vibe. I really did.
But this book was too long, and too short at the same time. Once again, I am begging contemporary romance authors to return to 350-page books. There were so many plot lines in The Charlie Method that didn’t need to be there. The story could have worked without Harrison (I get that it’s trying to highlight adoption), without the car subplot (she honestly just comes off as a bit of a pick-me), without Will’s dad’s political image obsession (why can’t these boys have good dads??), and without Beckett’s girlfriend’s passing (which felt unnecessarily dark). Seriously—why do we need to douse all these men in trauma for them to be appealing? They’re great as is.
Then there’s the elephant in the room: the throuple. It’s fine—I read Omegaverse. I’m enchanted by Pack Darling, Lola and the Millionaires, and I reread The Bonds That Tie series multiple times. BUT the problem is that books like these either have to go all in on the throuple dynamic or they risk coming across half-baked. And unfortunately, The Charlie Method falls into the latter category. Especially when it goes out of its way to tell us that this isn’t a M/M book—which, fine, if that’s not the direction. But then I really wanted to see more of Beckett and Will’s dynamic within the relationship, not just how they relate to Charlie. At times, it felt like they were both Charlie’s part-time boyfriends. And that’s being generous—because Will was barely in this book compared to Beckett. I love them both, but I just wish there had been more Will + Charlie, especially when there was so much Will + Beckett on-page.
👥Characters
Despite the fact that the relationship wasn’t my favorite, Charlie might just be one of my favorite FMCs—or at least, what she could have been. I resonated so hard with the STEM girl who schedules everything, lives in spreadsheets, and thrives under structure. But the whole “she also secretly races cars” subplot felt a bit fanfic to me—I could’ve done without it. That said, I really liked her growth arc as she begins stepping outside societal expectations after being put on a pedestal her entire life.
Will was great. I just wanted more Will. His relationship with his father felt believable, and I could understand the pressure he was under. You know what wasn’t believable, though? The fact that Will spends the entire book convincing Charlie their arrangement is okay… only to be the one who flakes at the end. There’s one chapter where he tells them he’s not ready, and then literally one chapter later he’s doing well at work and suddenly decides—“yup, I’m ready”? Okay??
Beckett was lovely, if a little repetitive. The emotionally unavailable chill guy with hidden trauma is tried and true for a reason. He was sweet, enjoyable to read about, and quickly became a golden retriever for Charlie—which I didn’t hate at all.
And then there’s the Will and Beckett of it all. It almost felt like Elle Kennedy couldn’t decide whether they were going to get together or not. There are all these conversations about how they like being with women together, Will admitting he wouldn’t mind getting involved with Beckett, Beckett reading that and being okay with it… such big emotional climbs toward intimacy between them—and then… nothing? We go right back to reaffirming, over and over again, that they’re not together, but they are both with Charlie. I think it would’ve been much more satisfying if Will and Beckett had gotten together too. Honestly, it read like Elle Kennedy wanted to go in that direction but backed off at the end—and I’m not really sure why it fell flat.
📖 Plot
It was… too much. When I read contemporary romance, I’m looking for a palate cleanser, not something that makes me connect every single bit and piece together. Like I mentioned earlier, this book is about 200 pages too long.
I’m fine with friction and stakes for the characters—but I felt like the societal pressure they were already facing was enough to carry the plot. The car subplot, the ex-girlfriend trauma, the politician dad, the perfectionist family and sorority drama, the slut-shaming ex-boyfriend, the family-move-to-Australia dilemma, the long-lost adoptive brother… it was just a lot. All of these needed to be tied together somehow, which made the book feel too long and too short at the same time.
And then there’s the spice. I’m no stranger to spicy books or multiple explicit scenes, but I have to say—a third of the book being spice, stacked on top of this many plotlines, just didn’t land right for me. Spicy scenes can be incredibly rewarding (i.e. Hannah and Garrett in The Deal) if there’s proper buildup and emotional tension leading into them. As someone who doesn’t even love spice once the main couple gets together (yes, I know, I’m going to call my therapist about this at some point), this just felt overdone.
And then my biggest gripe… THEY RAN AWAY. After spending the entire book building toward the idea that they can be together, that Charlie doesn’t need to be perfect, that Will doesn’t have to conform, and that their love is valid even when society doesn’t approve—that’s great! But then… they run away to Australia?! Come on! When the book is so clearly set up as a social commentary about the boxes we put ourselves in, it almost felt like it subconsciously shamed them out of the continent just for wanting to live the way they want to.
✍️ Writing Style
There’s one thing I can always rely on, though—and that’s giggling my way through an Elle Kennedy book. Her writing is effervescent, bubbly, and just makes me laugh the majority of the time. I’m a sucker for the way she weaves in previous characters and teases the next generation of the cast (hint hint: Isaac and Blake), and she does that very masterfully.
The Dad Chat and other text exchanges are so good, and every time she connects these books back to the first-generation Briar U crew, I’m ecstatic.
I even appreciated her nod to fanfiction authors getting picked up for traditional publishing left and right these days—but I will say there were a few too many chapters of The Virgin and the Blade for me. That’s something I can live with, though.
✨ What Stood Out
What stood out to me was how individual characters can carry a book, even when the plot doesn’t quite land. I loved Charlie, Will, and Beckett individually, despite the fact that the overall relationship dynamic didn’t mesh for me. I kept going back to the book just to see what they’d do next. And honestly, I’m too invested in the Briar U universe to move on from it. And despite some of it falling flat, it’s still Elle Kennedy writing—so like… even the subpar parts are superior to a lot of what’s out there.
📚 Recommendation
If you’re already invested in Briar U and love Elle Kennedy’s writing, you’ll probably enjoy this. It was a good read—I don’t think I’ll be rushing to reread it like I might with The Deal or The Dixon Rule, but I’m glad I’m continuing in this universe.
I do want to clarify: if you’re an avid Why Choose / Reverse Harem reader, this one doesn’t go as far as you might like. But you also might not enjoy this if you’re not into throuples or love triangles… so it puts the book in a bit of an awkward middle ground.
🧠 Closing Thoughts
Overall, The Charlie Method was a good time, though not my favorite installment in Elle Kennedy’s Briar U universe. I’ve reread The Deal multiple times, and while I’m glad I read this one, it doesn’t quite make it into reread territory for me.
What’s more important, though? I’m a lifetime Elle Kennedy reader—and this book didn’t change that. I appreciate the entertainment and escapism this story brought me… not to mention, I am dying to read Blake and Isaac’s book—even if it’s mostly just to see what the insanely protective John Logan is like as a girl dad.
✨ New to Elle Kennedy’s universe? Start with The Deal—you won’t regret it!
📖 Just getting started with Campus Diaries? Grab your copy of The Graham Effect!
Thanks for reading my full review and synopsis of The Charlie Method by Elle Kennedy! Whether you loved it, felt mixed, or are still on the fence, I’d love to hear your thoughts—drop a comment or come yell with me on TikTok or BlueSky.
Until next time—happy reading, Briar U lovers. 📚💙
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