You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
rory11 's review for:
The Boy With The Bookstore
by Sarah Echavarre Smith
Honestly, for the average rating I thought this was pretty good for the first two thirds. It had some major issues for my tastes as a reader (I lean towards slow burns where I can see all of the relationships grow and this just jumped pretty quick to a relationship of sorts) and the "enemies" portion of the story felt like it was included for the sake of the blurb...seriously...the summary of the book has all components of the antagonistic behavior. But overall, not terrible.
My issue came in the third act break up. It was a huge blow up fight--over some pretty legitimate issues--and I don't think that the relationship was developed strongly enough on page (there's a six week or so time skip) to warrant all of the immediate forgiving between characters. Then all of the other sideplots also got magically fixed within the span of a few pages. It all felt too easy and simplistic...and therefore not at all believable.
Finally. In the last thirty pages of the book or so I had this thought that Whitney was basically like a cardboard prop just there to tell the main characters how cute they were. And then proceeded to do so four times in the last 30 pages. Almost identical wording every single time. That more than anything made me sad.
All in all...it is a fast paced book that intentionally wraps eveything up super neatly because it doesn't provide a ton of room for believable character growth.
My issue came in the third act break up. It was a huge blow up fight--over some pretty legitimate issues--and I don't think that the relationship was developed strongly enough on page (there's a six week or so time skip) to warrant all of the immediate forgiving between characters. Then all of the other sideplots also got magically fixed within the span of a few pages. It all felt too easy and simplistic...and therefore not at all believable.
Finally. In the last thirty pages of the book or so I had this thought that Whitney was basically like a cardboard prop just there to tell the main characters how cute they were. And then proceeded to do so four times in the last 30 pages. Almost identical wording every single time. That more than anything made me sad.
All in all...it is a fast paced book that intentionally wraps eveything up super neatly because it doesn't provide a ton of room for believable character growth.