Happy Wednesday Friends :)
I hope you're all having a great week!
I'm back after my quick getaway with my hubby and one of our good friends, and it was an amazing weekend at The Saskatchewan Entertainment Expo. We met celebrities, we attended panels, we shopped till we dropped, and we most of all enjoyed being part of the fandom culture.
I was a little more limited in what I could do this time because I'm still recovering from the injuries I sustained when I took a bad tumble a week and a half ago, but it was still a really fun weekend. And I'm thankful we were still able to go.
I do plan on doing a post about our experiences at the expo with you all in the near future, but for today's post I wanted to review a book for you all that I recently finished.
When We Collided by Emery Lord:
Source: Gift from my hubby
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication Date: April 5th, 2016
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Synopsis:
Seventeen year-old Jonah Daniels has lived in Verona Cove, California, his whole life, and only one thing has ever changed: his father used to be alive, and now he is not. With a mother lost in a deep bout of depression, Jonah and his five siblings struggle to keep up their home and the restaurant their dad left behind. But at the start of summer, a second change rolls in: Vivi Alexander, the new girl in town.
Vivi is in love with life. Charming and unfiltered, she refuses to be held down by the medicine she's told should make her feel better. After meeting Jonah, she slides into the Daniels' household seamlessly, winning over each sibling with her imagination and gameness. But it's not long before Vivi's zest for life begins to falter. Soon her adventurousness becomes all-out danger-seeking.
Through each high and low, Vivi and Jonah's love is put to the test . . . but what happens when love simply isn't enough?
(synopsis from goodreads)
My Review:
To say I was looking forward to finally reading this one would be an understatement. I'd absolutely adored the previous books I'd read by this author, and I was looking forward to seeing how well she tackled the mental illness subject matter that I knew was one of the main plot points of this book. However, I ended up feeling pretty disappointed when I did finally get around to reading it, and it was honestly nothing like what I was expecting and/or hoping for.
Most of my issues lay within the character of Vivi, the main protagonist. To put it mildly, she was insufferable and completely obnoxious. I'm not talking about the fact that she was struggling with mental illness, I'm talking about the fact that her personality grated on my nerves right from the opening sentences. She was written in a "manic pixie dream girl" type of characterization, and had the bohemian, wispy, and carefree type of attributes. Her character basically had no boundaries, and I grew tired very quickly of hearing about her creative mindset, and the past lives she'd believed she lived in the past.
With having so many issues with the main character, it's not surprising that I wasn't rooting for the romance. I more or less spent most of the book hoping that Jonah would come to his senses, and choose his friend from childhood over Vivi and her constant dramatic nonsense that most of the time made absolutely no sense to this reader.
While I applaud this author for tackling the controversial subject of mental illness, I didn't care for the way it was handled, and I also didn't care for the writing. A lot of the passages made no sense, especially when it came to the over top descriptions of Vivi and her ridiculousness. Add to these factors that the novel includes various f-bombs, as well as numerous other cuss words, and explicit sexual content and descriptions, and it's safe to say that this one was just not for me.
The only parts of this novel that I even remotely enjoyed were Jonah and his various siblings. I loved the complex family dynamic that exists between the group of them, and the fact that the older three will go to extreme lengths to keep their family functioning, despite it being a lot of responsibility to fall to a group of teenagers.
Unfortunately, this book fell flat for me, and I won't personally be recommending it. I'd definitely suggest picking up either The Start of Me and You or Open Road Summer by this author over this one, and I can guarantee this particular novel will not be a reread for me in the future.
Final Rating: 2/5
Thanks so much for reading guys! Have a great rest of your day!
This is not a sponsored post. All thoughts and opinions are my own. The photo does not belong to me, and all rights to the respective owners.
I hope you're all having a great week!
I'm back after my quick getaway with my hubby and one of our good friends, and it was an amazing weekend at The Saskatchewan Entertainment Expo. We met celebrities, we attended panels, we shopped till we dropped, and we most of all enjoyed being part of the fandom culture.
I was a little more limited in what I could do this time because I'm still recovering from the injuries I sustained when I took a bad tumble a week and a half ago, but it was still a really fun weekend. And I'm thankful we were still able to go.
I do plan on doing a post about our experiences at the expo with you all in the near future, but for today's post I wanted to review a book for you all that I recently finished.
When We Collided by Emery Lord:
Source: Gift from my hubby
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication Date: April 5th, 2016
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Synopsis:
Seventeen year-old Jonah Daniels has lived in Verona Cove, California, his whole life, and only one thing has ever changed: his father used to be alive, and now he is not. With a mother lost in a deep bout of depression, Jonah and his five siblings struggle to keep up their home and the restaurant their dad left behind. But at the start of summer, a second change rolls in: Vivi Alexander, the new girl in town.
Vivi is in love with life. Charming and unfiltered, she refuses to be held down by the medicine she's told should make her feel better. After meeting Jonah, she slides into the Daniels' household seamlessly, winning over each sibling with her imagination and gameness. But it's not long before Vivi's zest for life begins to falter. Soon her adventurousness becomes all-out danger-seeking.
Through each high and low, Vivi and Jonah's love is put to the test . . . but what happens when love simply isn't enough?
(synopsis from goodreads)
My Review:
To say I was looking forward to finally reading this one would be an understatement. I'd absolutely adored the previous books I'd read by this author, and I was looking forward to seeing how well she tackled the mental illness subject matter that I knew was one of the main plot points of this book. However, I ended up feeling pretty disappointed when I did finally get around to reading it, and it was honestly nothing like what I was expecting and/or hoping for.
Most of my issues lay within the character of Vivi, the main protagonist. To put it mildly, she was insufferable and completely obnoxious. I'm not talking about the fact that she was struggling with mental illness, I'm talking about the fact that her personality grated on my nerves right from the opening sentences. She was written in a "manic pixie dream girl" type of characterization, and had the bohemian, wispy, and carefree type of attributes. Her character basically had no boundaries, and I grew tired very quickly of hearing about her creative mindset, and the past lives she'd believed she lived in the past.
With having so many issues with the main character, it's not surprising that I wasn't rooting for the romance. I more or less spent most of the book hoping that Jonah would come to his senses, and choose his friend from childhood over Vivi and her constant dramatic nonsense that most of the time made absolutely no sense to this reader.
While I applaud this author for tackling the controversial subject of mental illness, I didn't care for the way it was handled, and I also didn't care for the writing. A lot of the passages made no sense, especially when it came to the over top descriptions of Vivi and her ridiculousness. Add to these factors that the novel includes various f-bombs, as well as numerous other cuss words, and explicit sexual content and descriptions, and it's safe to say that this one was just not for me.
The only parts of this novel that I even remotely enjoyed were Jonah and his various siblings. I loved the complex family dynamic that exists between the group of them, and the fact that the older three will go to extreme lengths to keep their family functioning, despite it being a lot of responsibility to fall to a group of teenagers.
Unfortunately, this book fell flat for me, and I won't personally be recommending it. I'd definitely suggest picking up either The Start of Me and You or Open Road Summer by this author over this one, and I can guarantee this particular novel will not be a reread for me in the future.
Final Rating: 2/5
Thanks so much for reading guys! Have a great rest of your day!
This is not a sponsored post. All thoughts and opinions are my own. The photo does not belong to me, and all rights to the respective owners.
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