I'm not sure why I keep doing this to myself. I go into these Kasie West books looking for a cute, fluffy, sweet romance.
I am almost always underwhelmed by them. Maybe it's because I really enjoyed the first book of hers that I read, which was P.S. I Like You. I thought it was a cute take on the 'You've Got Mail/Shop Around the Corner' trope. Ever since then, I have just found myself disappointed with her other books.

I did think that this was better than By Your Side, which I thought was utterly unbelievable and ridiculous. But really, it wasn't as good as I'd wanted it to be.

Things I liked:
1. The book cover. Super cutesy. And the models they have portraying the characters are great.


Things I didn't like:
1.My biggest problem is that Maddie, the main character, is an idiot. We are supposed to believe that she is super intelligent, but almost every decision she makes is just idiotic. She wins the lottery and decides to give her always-bickering parents two million dollars and her deadbeat lazy brother a million dollars, thinking it's going to magically solve the fact that they are all miserable and manipulative people. And then she's shocked when her parents continue to argue and her brother becomes an even bigger deadbeat. She throws money around at people she's never even spoken to in the past and is shocked when a jackass she goes to school with casually calls her out for buying friendships. She trusts the word of some distant relative who she'd never spoken to before and gives him half a million dollars for an 'investment opportunity', and is then shocked when he turns out to be a cheat.

She spends a lot of this book shocked.

I'm sorry, but I can't stand when authors make characters so ridiculously stupid. And maybe it's not the character being naive as much as the really poor foreshadowing. Every time she decides to make a purchase for someone else, it's totally obvious and predictable that it's going to blow up in her face. I get that she's only 18, but her common sense level is closer to that of a 10 year old.

2. I didn't like any of her friends either. Blaire was a judgmental bitch and Elise was more concerned with having attention lavished upon her than being there for her friend. I didn't feel like we got enough insight on Trina. The author obviously wanted us to mistrust her, which is why I was so sure the entire time that she was going to turn out to be a stand-up person. I would've liked to see some real friend moments between them that didn't include talking about money or spending it...but that would've spoiled the 'reveal' that Trina wasn't a piece of shit.

3. The romance. Now, I didn't HATE this romance, but I didn't like that Maddie kept inventing reasons to not tell Seth that she'd won the lottery. And then when she realized that Seth actually DID know (because OF COURSE HE DID. That would be big news and I doubt he'd be able to avoid it if he WANTED to.) she freaked out and assumed the absolute worst...because she's stupid. Or at the very least, her judgment is seriously flawed. I actually felt like Seth deserved better than her. Although I have to say, the date he planned for her was stinking cute.

4. Maddie's family was the worst. Her parents were so busy being completely self-involved that they allow their college-aged son to be a complete and utter deadbeat. I'm just saying, if my son was a free-loading lazy bum, I wouldn't let my other child give him a million freaking dollars.
Also, there is emotional manipulation as well. Maddie feels like she can't go away to college because her family will need her. At first I thought it was just her being kind of silly, but then her mother actually asks her to be there for them and it's obvious that she is, at least is some respect, feeling pressure to stay close to home.
Maddie's brother Beau is a lazy piece of crap. Sorry, not sorry. And none of his issues are even close to resolved. Instead, we get one short scene where Maddie tells him to get his shit together and he basically makes a joke of it and she just accepts that...and that's the end of the damn scene, and the end of his arc.
Oh, and the fact that her parents don't help Maddie find a financial advisor to help her is absolutely absurd. Yes, she's technically an adult, but any good parent would have helped guide her instead of just being completely selfish.

5. All of this comes down to poor execution in the story-telling. Relationships and situations are not well-developed and there are so many dangling storylines and questions that I have that shouldn't have been brought up at all if they weren't going to be properly addressed. The writing is just really lackluster and messy.


A few other things:

1. Maddie gets accepted to all of the colleges that she applied to except her first choice, which she never heard from. Then she learns that her first choice rescinded their offer because of a gossipy article written about her. It's at this point that she realized that someone must have thrown away her acceptance letter and that someone sent the admissions office the article. The book ends with zero resolution to this. She never learns what happened to her original acceptance letter. Also, we are expected to believe that some stupid rumor-filled gossip magazine article would cause UCLA to rescind their offer, but Stanford would be totally okay with it...alright...suuuuure...

2. The dialogue is very stilted and it is often lacking emotion. The last page of the book is a conversation between Seth and Maddie and it's just their words with zero description. I wanted more depth all around.

3. Maddie doesn't want to click a link from an unknown source because she's not 'stupid enough' to click it and put a virus on her phone. Two minutes later, she gets another text with the link and clicks on it. 🙄 Also, we never find out who texted her the link to let her know that the article was a thing.

4. I liked that Seth was Vietnamese, but I felt like there could've been more of an emphasis on his culture. We learn that his home is a multi-generational home, and that's about it. My biggest problem was that the only time we ever really hear about his heritage is after some moron says something ignorant or racist to him. It was very clumsily written.


5. This is super nitpicky...but I'm going for it anyway. At the very beginning of the book, Blaire tells Elise that she has 'popular envy.' It should be 'popularity envy'. 'Popular envy' suggests that the envy itself is popular. 'Popularity envy would suggest that the character is envious of popularity...which actually MAKES SENSE. Again, I know that it's super nitpicky, but you can't tell me that these characters are super intelligent and then have the supposedly smartest one making ridiculous grammatical errors.

All in all, I felt like this book was more of the same from Kasie West. Clueless main character, clueless presents, underwhelming romance. I think I'm just about done with this author.