Thank you to The Broke and The Bookish for this wonderful meme! If you want to learn how to participate, click here and check it out. Promise you won’t regret it.
Oh man guys! My book calendar is sooooo full of 2016 releases. But these are the ones I am MOST excited about!!
At twenty-two years old, aspiring musician Sydney Blake has a great life: She’s in college, working a steady job, in love with her wonderful boyfriend, Hunter, and rooming with her good friend, Tori. But everything changes when she discovers Hunter cheating on her with Tori—and she is left trying to decide what to do next.
Sydney becomes captivated by her mysterious neighbor, Ridge Lawson. She can’t take her eyes off him or stop listening to the daily guitar playing he does out on his balcony. She can feel the harmony and vibrations in his music. And there’s something about Sydney that Ridge can’t ignore, either: He seems to have finally found his muse. When their inevitable encounter happens, they soon find themselves needing each other in more ways than one…
All I knew was that Colleen Hoover is an author loved by many and that a few of my book tumblr friends were going crazy about it. So I bought it and thought to my self “My Body is Ready!”
Oh My Freaking Gosh. This Book. I just can’t. Dead.
Those are my fangirling thoughts of the book. Yes, it is as good as everyone says it is. Yes, it will leave you in a puddle of feels. Yes, it brings up a lot of issues that you are dealing with or makes you deal with them. This book is a music lovers dream come true.
First off, let me just say that I FREAKING loved that this was an interactive book and that every single one of the songs that was is in the book EXISTS. The songs were made especially for the BOOK. I have been spoiled and I want every book to be an interactive experience because it just made everything ten times better.
Secondly, two of the characters in the story had disabilities and they were not seen as less or inferior. They were portrayed as normal. NORMAL. I absolutely loved that Ms. Hoover addressed the fact that people who are deaf or that have any other disability are NORMAL. They are not different. They are human too. The social activist in me was just bursting with joy.
Third, I want to address the fact that the main female character, Sydney, is written as a strong female character. She finds out her boyfriend cheats on her and she breaks up with him and is all like GOODBYE WE AINT NEVAH EVAH GONNA BE TOGETHER AGAIN. When things get complicated between her and someone else (cough*my new secret lover*cough), she takes control of the situation and says BACK OFF I NEED SPACE and not only do we see a FEMALE character that says it, but we see a MALE character that LISTENS to what she wants.
Fourth, I want to say that I LOVED that this didn’t have sexy times (well except for that one scene towards the end, but it’s not really described soooo I don’t count it). Not everyone that is in college is having sex all the time or with a person they just met. I was so happy that this book was not “teens + lots of sex” like a lot of NA books out there that I shall not name. This was Young Adults in College + life issues = NA. THANK YOU COLLEEN HOOVER THANK YOU!
(Honestly, I have nothing against NA when it’s done right. I personally don’t like reading sexy times, but when people use the NA genre as an excuse to write a million sex scenes and hardly any plot lines, it pisses me off. Isn’t the erotica genre for that? Why do you have to go and RUIN a genre for me. Sigh. Okay, Rant over.)
(December 2022 Edit: Oh young naive little me in her early twenties that did not like reading about sexy times aka sex. This is hilarious to me now as someone who is married and in her early thirties. Totally okay with SMUT now but I will leave what I said above to keep the integrity of this review, and also to showcase that people can change and it is perfectly okay to do so as you grow older.)
The plot of the book was great. The plot lines were all believable. We had a ton of character development not just in the main characters, but in the secondary characters as well throughout the entire novel. There was also a good balance between the heavy moments and the lighter moments. Really I can’t say one bad thing about this book.
So my last suggestion to you is…
Goodreads Summary:
Take an administrative snafu, a bad breakup, and “The Hot-Tub Incident,” and you’ve got two thoroughly unprepared sophomores on a semester abroad. For American party girl Tasha, an escape to Oxford may be a chance to ditch her fame as a tabloid temptress, but wading Uggs-deep in feminist theory is not her idea of a break. Meanwhile, the British half of the exchange, studious Emily, nurses an aching heart amid the bikinis and beer pong of U.C. Santa Barbara. With an anthropologist’s eye for detail and a true ear for teen-speak, Abby McDonald crafts a funny, fast-paced, poignant look at survival, sisterhood, and the surprising ways we discover our true selves.
Review:
Folks, this is what I call good Realist Young Adult Contemporary Fiction. Phew… that was a long title but I want you to know what this book is all about. The first novel I read by Abby McDonald was Getting Over Garrett Delaney and it is one of my favorite novels to date. I’m pretty sure most of you know that by now. I believe this book was the first book she wrote for YA (Don’t quote me on that, I haven’t researched all of her completed works yet) and it was almost as Good as GOGD. This book was a little slow and almost a bit blah in the first one hundred pages, but after that, I remembered why Abby McDonald has become one of my favorite authors of this time. I’m a little tired of books that are too hard on my emotions and this book did connect me emotionally to the story but it did not rip me to shreds. Thank you Abby McDonald for taking care of my feelings.
This is a must read for everyone. Well, if you like YA or realist books that is. 🙂
Caution: This book is marked as Age 14 and up. It does not contain mature content but people openly talk about having sex in the book but they never describe sex at all. Just a warning to parents.
Rating: 4/5
Rating System:
1/5: I hated it.
2/5: It had some redeeming qualities but overall, not a good book.
3/5: I liked it (A fun read).
4/5: I really like it, but something was missing.
5/5: I love it! It’s as close to perfection as it can get!
The Talking Bookworm 