3.5 stars.

I received a free digital copy of this book from the publishers/author via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Nova was born blind but when she ends up getting an operation to restore her sight, she wakes up to a whole new world and one in which she needs to learn everything all over again. Kate on the other hand finds herself dealing with anxiety after an accident that’s left her with a lot of questions. Nova brings Kate light again but Kate may be bringing Nova down and soon, tough decisions have to be made.

I really enjoyed the first half of this book. It’s written really well, and easy and I fell into the story really quickly so it moved at a great pace for me and after a couple hours I was already halfway through. Nova is a character that is very easy to like - she’s fun, bubbly, infectious and from the moment we meet her, when she’s still blind, she’s the type of person you know would make your life better and make you happy.

I really like Nova’s individual storyline and her journey of rediscovery and relearning everything about the world now that she could see again. I never really thought about hard it must be for people with bad sight to suddenly be able to see clearly, and everything they would have to learn to just get about everyday. I also loved some of Nova’s observations about sight, particularly when it came to how food looked compared to how great it smelled.

I would have liked more of Nova’s job to be in the novel, particularly before her operation. I feel like the whole ‘she can tell people are lying by their voice’ thing was sold in the blurb and made it sound like it was a bigger point in the book when really it was a non-entity. Nova’s job wasn’t important at all, and I was disappointed by that as it sounded really cool to me.

I definitely had a hard time warming up to Kate as a character but she is definitely going through the wringer, even more so than Nova and is not in a good place in her life before. I did like the friendship and romance that sparked between the two but the second part of the book when the romance was heavier completely fell apart for me and i stopped enjoyed the book so much.

I felt like the story became a bit drawn out, and I was ready for it to be over. As a reader, I felt like i was waiting for the super obvious thing to happen for ages, and even when it did eventually happen, it was just so all over the place and almost over the top, I didn’t enjoy it at all.

The first half was much stronger than the second, which was a real pity.