Book Review:
One year. Nine events. Nine chances to . . . fall in love?
Weddings. Funerals. Barbecues. New Year's Eve parties. Name the occasion, and Sophie Evans will be there. Well, she has to be there. Sophie works for the local florist, so she can be found at every big event in her small hometown, arranging bouquets and managing family dramas.
Enter Andrew Hart. The son of the fancy new chef in town, Andrew is suddenly required to attend all the same events as Sophie. Entitled, arrogant, preppy Andrew. Sophie just wants to get her job done and finish up her sketches so she can apply to design school. But every time she turns around, there is Andrew, getting in her way and making her life more complicated. Until one day she wonders if maybe complicated isn't so bad after all . . .
My Review:
This was a mid-tier book. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exceptional. It was cute, as all Kasie West books I’ve read so far have been, but it was kind of annoying at times.
In general, I wasn't as attached to the romance in this book compared to other YA romance books I've read. I didn't see the chemistry between Sophie and Andrew, especially early on. In the first half, before the two of them get along, their dynamic wasn't fun to read about. I don't like reading about people arguing, which was pretty much all Sophie and Andrew did for half the book.
Similarly, the way Sophie interacted with and responded to Andrew early on got on my nerves. I was annoyed by the fact that Sophie always automatically went on the defensive whenever Andrew said something, even if it wasn't a rude remark. She couldn't take a compliment and just assumed he had nothing nice to say. This was also a good thing, though, because she learned from that and grew as a character.
On that note, something I think Kasie West does well in her books is making three-dimenstion characters with flaws. Her characters are far from perfect, but they're still likeable. They have negative traits, but they have growth over the course of the book. Sophie was that kind of character. She realized her own faults and tried to be better.
The biggest thing I liked about this book was the style. It's divided up into different sections, one for each event in town, with 4-6 chapters in each section. I loved the small town setting, and I think it would be cool to see all the different events, like the fall festival, visualized in a movie version of this book.
Content Warning:
No bad language
A few kisses and descriptions of the feelings Sophie gets when she's around Andrew/touching him, but it's all clean. The most that happens is an intense kiss, but it's not innappropriate.
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