3.5 rounded up! A Love Hate Thing tells the story of a boy and girl, both friends at a young age, but 10 years removed from one another and on completely different paths. Nandy has grown up privileged and her life is filled with cotillions and popularity. Trice on the other hand has grown up in Lindenwood, a rough and tough urban city with a bad reputation. As far as Nandy is concerned, everyone from Lindenwood is a hardened criminal and thug who can't be trusted. This means that she is both upset and confused when her parents tell her that Trice will be moving in with them permanently. She has no clue why he's here, but she knows it's going to ruin her entire summer. She's not completely wrong. While her summer isn't ruined, Trice arriving causes a definite shake up in her summer and her life. She's faced with the boy who she hasn't seen since she was 7 and he's different that she remembered, just like she's different for him as well. He remembers a sweet bossy girl who loved to have fun, but now she's just a stuck up princess. She remembers a sweet boy who followed her around, but now he's full of hurt and anger that she doesn't understand. It won't be easy for them, but who said love or hate was ever easy right?

Overall thoughts on this is that it was a great story. Whitney Grandison touched on love, hate, family and self applied pressures, grief, abuse, and so many other things with this one book. The best part of this story for me wasn't the love interest, but the story of grief and healing. I'll be honest and say that I found Nandy's character pretty much insufferable. She was needy, selfish, irritating, and completely naive. That's not to say that she's the first teenage girl in the YA world to be that way and certainly there are girls that reflect that in real life, but it was really hard for me to find redeeming qualities in her. I understand that things are tough and she's been sheltered so she has a lot to learn, but I found her getting on my nerves more than not. Her boyfriend Chad was equally insufferable. I think my biggest issue with the Chad Nandy dynamic is that Chad is made to seem redeemable because Nandy THINKS he is, when in fact he's a complete douchebag. Nandy refuses to see it and even when Chad does obvious bone head things, she may call it out but still writes it off just as how he is. I know the story isn't about Chad, so I'll let it go, but....yeah no he's a jerk and an asshole.

Trice's story was an interesting one and it drives the entire plot. For most of the time he's stuck between making this new life in the Hills and being drawn back to his old life in Lindenwood. He struggles with the grief of losing two parents to one incident, making it out of that incident alive, trying to overcome some bad choices and abuse. For most of the story he fights his new life because he doesn't think that he deserves it. It's hard to start fresh when everything you know is gone and your inner voice is telling you that it's unfair that you made it out and others didn't. In the meantime, he has Nandy making his life very complicated. He's scared to let anyone in, but she seems to be the person who may just break down his walls.

Like I said, I loved how this book approached grief and getting a second chance at life more than I loved it for the romance piece, but it was great to see two black teenage characters in a book like this one. While the romance just didn't do it for me, Trice and his character development did and that's definitely a story that I can get behind.