Review: Cute idea, but story itself didn't quite do it for me...
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 24, 2013
This book had some cute moments-in particular, I loved the scene where Brynn and Sawyer "meet" for the first time (he thinks-of course it's meet again, in reality)-and Brynn's web of lies results in some funny situations. As a whole, though, I just couldn't really connect with the two main characters. They spent way too much time inside their heads, and what was going on in there didn't always make sense, at least not to this reader. Brynn's refusal to get over her high school years in particular began to drive me crazy. More than once in the novel her assumptions about her past were proved wrong, yet she continued to cling to them. Even when given a darn good reason for Sawyer's "rejection" of her in high school, she still felt angry about it. It was frustrating. Sawyer too was a little over-the-top with his anti-actress stance, though he at least was more willing to put aside his preconceived notions in favor of the possibility of a different reality than Brynn was. Living in a small town myself, it also seemed odd to me that Brynn's and Sawyer's mothers could know each other well yet not realize that their children had gone to high school together. How had that never come up?Cindi Madsen is a new-to-me author, and while this book didn't quite do it for me, her writing intrigued me enough that I'm definitely willing to give another of her books a try in the hopes that it was just this particular heroine's story. The first book in the series, Falling for her Fiance, sounds cute (plus, I really do like the friends-to-lovers troupe), as does the next, Cinderella Screwed Me Over (with that title it has to be entertaining, right?).In a nutshell: this story has an interesting premise and some cute moments, but the characters fell flat for me. Three stars for the ideas, if not their execution.(I was given a copy of this book by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)