The Perfect Boy : Review

The Perfect Boy by Hailey Abbott
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ciara is a bit of a "player" and has the reputation to go with it. She decides she's done being a player and goes to stay with her dad in Santa Barbara for the summer. This is where she plans on finding "The Perfect Guy" and is convinced that this guy is AJ, a childhood friend who has transformed from nerd to hottest-boy-around. She teams up with Kevin, another childhood friends who has gone through a similar transformation, and they come up with Operation Woo-ha. The plan is to get AJ interested in Ciara and Maggie, nice-girl-turned-wild-child, interested in Kevin. The problem is that Maggie and AJ seem to be interested in each other. Ciara is so sure about AJ being the perfect guy that she is willing to do almost anything to get him, even if that means betraying her friends. Ciara discovers that her perfect guy may not be whom she's thought all along.

This book really didn't do it for me. I pushed through the first half and once I realized that the second half wasn't any better, I skimmed through it in about an hour. The whole thing just dragged on and on and there wasn't much of anything happening. The narration was a bit dull, the story wasn't convincing, the characters seemed very one dimensional, despite the author's efforts ( I felt like every time Ciara said something about her parent's divorce or AJ about his fame, they were just saying it because maybe that's what people say when they are in those situations, I didn't feel like they actually meant it or that they were genuinely feeling those things. I didn't believe any of it) and.... Well, it just wasn't up to par with the better YA romance novels.

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Book Review: When It Happens

When It Happens by Susane Colasanti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Warning: This review may contain hints of spoilers

Half-Way Point Impressions:
Sara is a romantic who has her own idea of the perfect guy and desperately wants that guy to be Dave. Dave is a popular kid who is dating Sara but might be doing it for all the wrong reasons. Dave might also be huge poser, pretending to be a certain way to fit into the cool crowd even if that way is not at all who he is. Tobey really likes Sara and is trying to figure out how he could get Sara to like her. Tobey also knows what a jerk Dave is and why he really wanted to be with Sara.
Sara has a troubled home life, in the sense that her dad isn't really in the picture and her mom doesn't really care much about her. Sara's mom seems to be someone who is dating someone different every other week and Sara is tired of. At one point in the book Sara even says that she wants someone to want to be with her (or something along those lines). Sara is also one of the smart kids.
Tobey is in band and is also smart but a huge slacker. He really wants his future to be about music and nothing else. He really likes Sara and hates that she likes Dave because he knows more about what kind of person Dave is that Sara does. Tobey recognizes that he could easily tell Sara the truth about Dave to get on her good side but he doesn't do this because he wants Sara to like him for who he is and not just because he's better than Dave.
As Sara dates Dave she seems to like him less and less and once she finds out that Tobey likes her, she finds herself becoming more attracted to Tobey, a guy she barely knows, than Dave, the guy she's dating.
I'm interested to see where this story is going to go from here.

Finished:
You know what I liked best about this book? The fact that even though there was a main story line (the relationship between Sara and Tobey) there were other things going on in the lives of the characters that didn't necessarily serve a direct purpose to the main story. What I mean to say is that there were other things going on in Sara and Tobey's lives that didn't have much to do with their relationship. This made them seem very real. For example, Tobey's conversations with his dad about college, or Sara's relationship with her mom who was there yet not there. Sara's issues with her mother didn't necessarily reach an epic climax where all was good and now they have the perfect mother-daughter relationship. There might have been a slight, miniscule improvement but definitely not the happily ever after kind. I like these kind of things in a story. I thought the book was about Sara and Tobey's romance but now I'm thinking its more about Sara, Tobey and their friends in their senior year of high school.

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Ramblings of a Logophile.: Cover Reveal: Lengths by Steph Campbell and Liz Re...

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Yes! I want to read this book.
I have a theory that when the characters names are uncommon the love story turns out to be wonderful! (Take Sarah Dessen for example)