Review: If Katy flip-flopped any more, she'd be an Olympic gymnast
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 2, 2014
Ay caramba, this book was highly rated by friends, so when I realized early on that I wasn't enjoying the book, I thought it was me and not the book.  The deeper that I got into the book, I knew that my displeasure was valid. I haven't seen a female  flip-flop as much since Mary Lou Retton at the Olympics.  Katy has spent much of her teen life living with her deceased parents' best friends.  Katy decides that she is in love with her foster brothers, and chooses one to be her love and future, while secretly desiring the other brother (this all took place while still in high school).  So we witness her repeatedly proclaiming that she loves the one brother, Brooks, yet she says she is making the right decision of dating the other brother, Branch. They are all living in the same house, and no one seems to be bothered with the situation or that it's weird. Maybe I'm weird, especially when she unknowingly sleeps with the wrong brother twice. Brooks goes his own way after graduation, and Katy grieves after him in one breath, then in the next breath, she is relieved that she picked Branch.A few years pass, then on the night before her wedding night, Katy makes a big ole mistake.  I don't want to give away any spoilers, but throughout the book, I read where Katy is so worried that she will make her family mad and she couldn't bear to lose them, so she hides from them.  On one hand, she is in love with Brooks, but she won't have any contact with him, but she professes that she'll never love another man.  She finds another man, Bobby, tells him that she'll never love him, but enters into a relationship.  She says she knows that she'll never truly love Bobby, but then is determined to stay with him and make the relationship work, while secretly contacting Brooks.  One day when she meets Brooks, that evening when Bobby finds out, she professes that she'll never leave Bobby for Brooks.  By the end of the next day, she is back with Brooks.  It's a reoccurring theme throughout the book.The citizens in Sumter,SC  are written to look like backwoods hillbillies.  When dealing with domestic abuse, the abuser's family and friends tell Katy that it's her fault.  Throughout the story, Katy is stating that she doesn't deserve his abuse, but then in the next breath, she has caused the abuser to become violent. I could almost get her reaction if she grew up in this type of environment, but she didn't grow up around abuse.  Katy recognized that the abuse was wrong in the beginning, but she stayed in the relationship because the hillbilly friends and neighbors that she has known for less than a year or two have convinced her that the abuser deserves a second, third, and fourth chance.I thought in the beginning that maybe the story was good, but the book and I just weren't compatible, but the more that I read, I realized that I was justified in being pissed at all the crap being said and then a sudden reversal in the next sentence. Katy did so many reversals and flip-flops that she should have been called Nadia Comaneci.