Day 1: Julia Donnelly eggs my house my first night back in Star Lake, and that’s how I know everyone still remembers everything—how I destroyed my relationship with Patrick the night everything happened with his brother, Gabe. How I wrecked their whole family. Now I’m serving out my summer like a jail sentence: Just ninety-nine days till I can leave for college, and be done.Day 4: A nasty note on my windshield makes it clear Julia isn’t finished. I’m expecting a fight when someone taps me on the shoulder, but it’s just Gabe, home from college and actually happy to see me. “For what it’s worth, Molly Barlow,” he says, “I’m really glad you’re back.”
Day 12: Gabe got me to come to this party, and I’m actually having fun. I think he’s about to kiss me—and that’s when I see Patrick. My Patrick, who’s supposed to be clear across the country. My Patrick, who’s never going to forgive me.
Review
So one of the the things that I look for in a really great book, is a main character that I love, am interested in and can root for. Molly Barlow doesn't really add up to this character for me. For a while I actually did like her, I found her to be an incredibly honest character, who'd made a mistake and was now paying for it,
The issue is, that she didn't remain that character. The more the book went on, the more I started disliking her, to the point that on more than one occasion, I actually put the book down, specifically because reading was annoying me, because of Molly's character.
With Molly you get a flawed character for sure, and I'm not wholly against flawed characters, It's like I said, it makes them seem honest, because nobody is perfect, and so characters who are, don't really fit well into realistic fiction. So I don't mind flawed characters who make mistakes.
What I don't like, are characters (especially ones who are meant to be the protagonist) making the same mistakes over and over, and knowingly hurting people. That is what I felt Molly was doing in this book.
Her actions had already hurt Patrick, and you would have thought (and hoped) that this would have taught her a decent lesson about how to treat people, but no. She goes on to make more selfish decisions, which affected my opinion of her character, and in relation, my enjoyment of the book.
To look at some of the positives. I thought there were some incredibly cute scenes between Molly and Gabe, and Gabe I did like as a character. He was, again, flawed, but not to the degree of me wanting to throw the book across the room.
On the whole, this book is well written, and there are some good characters in there. There are moments in it which I really loved, and others that had me super frustrated by the leading character.
So this was a difficult one for me to rate, because Molly started out as a good character that I felt sorry for, but quickly spiralled downwards, and didn't climb back up.
Had Molly made some different choices, and shown some more character development, I would have really enjoyed this book. As it stands, it's ok.
Rating
4/10
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