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purplelorikeet 's review for:
The Kissing Booth
by Beth Reekles
I will start off by mentioning that I watched the first half of the film on Netflix well before reading this. The reason I mention this is that while reading this book, I could picture the actors in the main roles and just on that alone the book didn't work for me.
Rochelle and Lee are best friends from birth, almost literally. They were born the same day and they have grown up doing everything together. For many years, Rochelle has had a crush on Lee's older brother Noah, a bit of a bad boy player type who also goes to their high school. The best friends end up organising a kissing booth for the school and due to circumstances, Rochelle ends up kissing Noah in front of a crowd from school while Lee is off pursuing a girl. Some sort of romance starts up between them and the story goes from there.
I didn't much like this book. First of all the book is obviously not written by an American writer even though it's set there. I think I worked out this was written on Wattpad when the writer was a teenager. I do read books on this platform and the number of writers from outside of the US writing with a US location is pretty amazing. Most of the time the writers have basically just planted their characters in a location they know nothing about and expect the way they write about them to work in that setting. Language use is almost always the big issue and the words usage here reflects it. It's one thing for the narrative to use the wrong terminology but when the dialogue is totally messed up, it's time to rethink the setting. Honestly I can't work out why this had to be set in California and not some place local.
The other issue is there is just no character development at all. It's mostly a bunch of one-dimensional characters and a bit of narrative about what happens.
What this tells me is there must be a whole lot of books launched from Wattpad without doing some decent editing and revision. It's the sort of book that never would have been published in earlier times and probably shouldn't have. There just isn't much of a story here.
I do wonder if the writer has improved with time. I'd like to see if that fifteen year old writer has matured into a much better one.
It's been a few weeks since I finished this but I think I only gave it about 1.5 stars in the end.
Rochelle and Lee are best friends from birth, almost literally. They were born the same day and they have grown up doing everything together. For many years, Rochelle has had a crush on Lee's older brother Noah, a bit of a bad boy player type who also goes to their high school. The best friends end up organising a kissing booth for the school and due to circumstances, Rochelle ends up kissing Noah in front of a crowd from school while Lee is off pursuing a girl. Some sort of romance starts up between them and the story goes from there.
I didn't much like this book. First of all the book is obviously not written by an American writer even though it's set there. I think I worked out this was written on Wattpad when the writer was a teenager. I do read books on this platform and the number of writers from outside of the US writing with a US location is pretty amazing. Most of the time the writers have basically just planted their characters in a location they know nothing about and expect the way they write about them to work in that setting. Language use is almost always the big issue and the words usage here reflects it. It's one thing for the narrative to use the wrong terminology but when the dialogue is totally messed up, it's time to rethink the setting. Honestly I can't work out why this had to be set in California and not some place local.
The other issue is there is just no character development at all. It's mostly a bunch of one-dimensional characters and a bit of narrative about what happens.
What this tells me is there must be a whole lot of books launched from Wattpad without doing some decent editing and revision. It's the sort of book that never would have been published in earlier times and probably shouldn't have. There just isn't much of a story here.
I do wonder if the writer has improved with time. I'd like to see if that fifteen year old writer has matured into a much better one.
It's been a few weeks since I finished this but I think I only gave it about 1.5 stars in the end.