A review by jseymour2000
Offsetting Penalties by Ally Mathews

4.0

***I received this book through Netgalley for an honest review***

I gave this book 3.5 stars. I liked the book, it was short and sweet.

This book was surprisingly short, I was at work and took my fifteen-minute break and I was reading this during that break and I somehow read about 15% of the book in that time alone. It helped that it was a real page-turner, I wanted to keep reading, but man that was fast.

Because of how short it was I feel like there was a lot of things plot-wise that were left open-ended. A lot of things the reader wonders about aren’t ever resolved. It’s something that often bothers me about contemporary novels. I know contemporaries are supposed to be more realistic so something won’t get resolved, but in some of these books, such as this one, they lead you to believe that something will be done to fix them and when it doesn’t happen during the duration of the book its kind of annoying.

The climax of the story was kind of predictable, but I didn’t actually predict it so I guess it succeeded in being a good climax. At the same time, I also felt that the climax was resolved a bit too easily. The person that was causing the problem in the first place gave in despite being so against going in in the first place which felt like a cop-out.

Despite the few things that bothered me, the characters were incredibly relatable and good-hearted, you couldn’t hate them. The atmosphere of the book was cheerful, it never made me want to cry or thrown things. It was a nice read, good for contemporary lovers.