Review: Book Review: From Author Unpublished
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 27, 2014
To be honest, this was a cute book, and a fast read. Technically speaking, the writing was clean, easy to follow, grammatically correct (with the exception of one missed word I found), and never made me feel that it was dragging, or being rushed. I liked it.  This was your typical teen romance story where the main characters made a lot of stupid, impulsive mistakes, and spent the book sorting out their drama-filled issues.However, despite the appeal of the narrative from a technical standpoint, or how adorable the love story was, there were certainly some issues that cropped up that made me rate this at 3 stars rather than a 4 or 5. The biggest problem I had with this story was that it was horrendously cliché. Watch any teen romance movie, and you’ve practically read this story; Boy and Girl from two different clique’s, living next to each other, used to be best friends, start to fall in love after years of estrangement—after having come to an agreement that they would pretend to be boyfriend/girlfriend for awhile… thus saving one teen’s reputation, and preventing the other from a messier, more clingy relationship. Don’t forget the date-raping jock. We’ve all heard this story. It’s old, and used, and left nothing to surprise me. It even has one of those moments where the guy in a rock band hops down off the stage to sing to the girl he loves at the end. (Sorry, spoilers.. but if you haven’t seen this a million times before in other teen romances… shame on you.)To make matters worse, the characters have ridiculous trendy names (like Ashton, Blaze, Kance, and Luca… Ashton is a girl by the way, I know, it threw me off too), and there are almost no redeeming qualities about the main female lead at all. She’s snobby, mean-spirited, and a bully. Luca, the male lead isn’t much better… he may be a teen, but he’s already been sleeping with a ton of girls, and seems to be your typical emo stereotype, complete with eyeliner and tattoos. Le sigh.The story that ensues is a predictable mish-mosh of over dramatic teen angst that comes off as a little too familiar to be comfortable. Did I like it? Yah. It was an all right story. It was cute, as I said… but it certainly wasn’t genre-breaking. To be frank, the two main characters were both written like girls, and had a very similar voice, with the exception that Luca’s head seemed to constantly be sizing up how “hot” Ashton was in one form or another (okay, maybe Ashton did the same to Luca…). They didn’t seem real to me, but instead, like the plot, stereotypes of a very narrow view of teenage girls/boys. I wish the author had spent more type filling out these characters, and perhaps, finding a more original plot.Would I recommend it? Sure. It’s 99 cents on Amazon right now, and to be fair, it is an adorable story. If you like teen romance stories, you’ll be comfortable with this one. It’s cute. Just don’t expect to get anything spectacular out of it, you’ve probably read it before.