Review: Entertaining Story About a Girl Figuring Out Who She Is
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 1, 2013
If you're anything like me you read the description for this book and thought,"Wow, that sounds a lot like Audrey, Wait!." Maybe some people would make that connection and think it's a bad thing, but I for one thought it was a good thing. I love Audrey, Wait! and why wouldn't I want to read something similar, but hopefully also quite different?I'm happy to say that this in indeed quite different from Audrey, Wait! but I still think Audrey, Wait! is a superior book. I did enjoy Another Little Piece of My Heart even if I didn't love it. This book is also supposed to be a retelling of Jane Austen's Persuasion, but I've never read that so I can't comment on it.When the story starts Claire (it took a strange number of pages for us to learn her name which kind of threw me off a little) is hanging out with her best friend when they hear the pop song of the moment come on, a song called Daddy's Girl which was written by Claire's ex-boyfriend, Jared, about Claire. See Claire broke up with him at her dying mother's request. Her rich, snobby parents didn't think this poor musician boy was good enough for Claire and even though Claire loved Jared she went along with it thinking if she took some of the stress out of her mother's life she might get better.Isn't that so sad? Both that her mom hated Jared so much and that Claire loved her mom so much she did it. But it happened and two years later Claire is about to graduate from high school and she's sad and alone. It's ok though because she's going to go away to college and she has her band and it will all work out. Then Claire finds out that her dad, who's a total idiot, has lost her college funds to bad investments and she can't start college in the fall.Fast forward about a month and Claire, pissed off that she's not going to college, is on her way to New Hampshire with her little sister to spend the summer at her aunt and uncle's beach house along with her dad and his hot secretary. Shortly after they arrive in NH, on Claire's first day at her new job at the grocery store (she has to start pulling her weight now that her dad's not rich), Jared and a friend come in and Claire is obviously shocked to see him in this small NH town. Claire finds out that by some strange coincidence Jared is staying with his friend Mike, who goes to UNH with Claire's cousin.This obviously brings up a lot of feelings in Claire and her and Jared running into each other and the anger and tension between them make up most of the story. See, no one knows that Claire is the one the songs were about, well Claire knows and her sister and best friend know, but that's about it. So everyone is super excited to be hanging out with his rockstar while Claire is just trying to keep herself together.It took me a little while to settle into the story. Quite a bit of it takes place inside Claire's head and I often found myself wishing for some more action. But I did like Claire. She's been dealt a tough hand the last few years: a sick mom, breaking up with someone she loves (which was her choice, but still not an easy one), her mom dying, being stuck with her crappy dad, and not being able to go away to college (I'm not saying she was entitled to have her dad pay for her to go away, but when that's the expectation and it's ripped out from under her that's tough). I really appreciated how Claire never wallowed too much. Sometimes she wallowed about Jared, but mostly she was all about action. She got a job to try to be fiscally responsible, she tried to be nicer to her annoying little sister to be the good adult in her sister's life, and even when she was upset about something her dad or Jared did she tried to be proactive and turn it into a song.As the book went on I really appreciated how this came to be a story about Claire finding herself. It's not the most complete or interesting finding yourself story I've read, but I was entertained by it and I liked the journey that Claire went on and the person she managed to become in the end.Bottom Line: I think this is a perfectly entertaining book. It starts off kind of slow, but I eventually got into it and found myself enjoying the story and getting to know Claire. I appreciated the music references and I liked how even though a lot of the story was about Claire dealing with a break up, it was more about Claire figuring out what she wants, not only romantically, but also from her family and from herself.I received an electronic review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley (thank you!). All opinions are my own.