Review: Juleo/Leolie
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 31, 2014
Authors need to plot out their book before they start to write it.  That way, a book that starts out as a romance, with no foreshadowing or warning, does not take a turn into a different kind of book midway through the plot.Draw Me In is told through the eyes of Julie, an art student at NYU.  She meets Leo, a young businessman, at the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence, while she is leading a group of drawing students who are doing studies of the statue, David.  Months afterward, back home in New York City, Julie runs into Leo again in the midtown coffee shop where she works.  So far so good on the romance.  Sometimes the details bog down the pacing, and some of the humor is a little dorky and awkward.  Whatever, you can push through that.Julie has no family that is in the plot (how her tuition is being paid is not addressed.)  She wanders through her days talking to herself, palling around with her loyal friend and roommate, and clumsily tripping, breaking things and spilling things on people.  Julie can draw but has no sense of what that skill can do for her.  (Neither, apparently, does the author.). Where is the career advisor for Julie?  Where is the adult life coach?  These college students who need direction and focus have resources available to help them.  I have so little patience for the 22-year old characters in YA books who reinvent the wheel all the time, trying to figure things out on their own, bumbling around, when there are people who are paid to guide and help them at the campus career office at the expensive schools they attend.  So many YA authors avoid any interaction between their characters and the grown-ups who may have some answers.  In any case, an opportunity falls into Julie's lap.  From here, the romance takes a weird turn, borderline tragic.  What?This author has some fear (or other boundaries) that keep her from writing intimate scenes.  She hints around, and she describes kissing without any hang ups, but beyond that her adult characters are chaste.  Until they are not, which is not described.  Authors: Either go there or don't, but don't write halfway, and don't write YA if you have personal limits that do not fit the genre.  Try young teen or tween.  They have romances, and most of them are scared of sex, too.