2.5 Stars
I struggled with deciding what to rate this book. On one hand, I liked the concept. It's definitely a little tropey: first love comes back to town but a big dark secret is keeping them apart...but if it's done well, I really enjoy stories where first loves come back together. Unfortunately, I just didn't feel like this book lived up to my expectations, and it definitely wasn't accurately reflected in the synopsis.

Things that I liked:

1. Side characters with personality. For the most part, I liked the secondary characters in this story. Cory, Mackenzie, and Gwen were fun and interesting characters, and I liked the dynamic of the three of them with Declan and Harper. I did feel like Sadie and Kyle very one-dimensional, and wish they hadn't been such caricatures.

2. Declan was a good guy. I felt bad for him because I felt like he deserved better than Harper.

3. The book cover is really beautiful. The book cover is half the reason I put the book in my cart.

Things I didn't like:

1. HARPER.

What a miserable character. Oh my goodness, this girl is an absolute mess. At the beginning of the book she learns her mom has cancer. In order to dull the pain of that, she spends most of her time going out and getting wasted and messing around with random guys with her bad-influence friend Sadie. But she didn't really need her mom's illness as an excuse to be self-destructive and irresponsible. She's got so many excuses it's not even funny. Seriously, every single time she doesn't get exactly what she wants, she uses that as an excuse for wildly irresponsible behavior. Her boyfriend was sent off to boarding school. Her response?

To get so wasted she blacks out and has to be saved by her friend before she has sex with another guy she's never even met.

Oh, that's the big 'secret', by the way. And dragging it out for almost 200 pages when it's something as predictable as that is just lazy storytelling, imo.
Anyway, back to Harper. So this girl has some serious self-destructive tendencies. She literally cannot deal with being by herself. She's also one of the most selfish characters I've ever read about. Everything is about her.

Declan's mom's death? You would've thought it was HER mom who had passed away, the way she used it as justification for pushing away Declan. Declan going off to boarding school and actually making friends, some of whom were...GIRLS?! Well, it just left her so incredibly lonely she just couldn't help but go out and cheat on him! Seriously, everything is about her and how it makes her feel. Never a thought for anyone else. Even her best guy friend (who she always calls whenever she's wasted and wants to get away from whatever loser is trying to hump her leg) showing his new girlfriend attention is remarked upon in terms of how it affects her:
"As soon as I've caught up, Mackenzie grabs Cory's hand and sprints toward the Ferris
wheel. They get in line and I feel a twinge of loss. Which isn't at all justified since it's not
like Cory has stopped including me, or that he was ever mine to begin with. But without
swim practices, I already see less of him. And it's little things, like the way he's always
near Mackenzie, looking our for her, that make me wonder whether he's done looking out
for me that way."

She uses her mother's cancer to get out of going to school and avoid Declan, and then doesn't even help her mom with chemo or anything. She sleeps in. Her comment? "Yeah, I'm going to hell. What else is new?" Such a selfish person.
Now, if she had actually shown some growth throughout the course of the novel, maybe I could've excused some of this. But seriously, every single time she doesn't get her way immediately, she backslides.

At the end when Declan is late for the party, he tells her he's not sure if he can make it. It takes her literally five minutes to start drinking and smoking pot. She tries to act like it was such a favor to Declan that she hadn't had anything to drink up until that point, and then justifies her actions by saying something along the lines of, "what does it matter? He's not going to be here anyway." After all of that, we never get a real resolution. Everything is left very much up in the air, at least in my opinion. Who is to say that she won't lash out the next time he has to end a conversation before she's ready or can't come home one weekend? Or what if he, god forbid, wants to go out with some friends to get food or go bowling or something?

I had absolutely no sense that any of her behavior would change at the end of the novel. In reality, I feel like this book would've been better served if her character half-way through had started seeing a therapist or something. I really didn't want Declan and Harper together. I wanted Harper to find a little bit of self-esteem and self-respect as her own person instead of relying on Declan and their relationship to measure her own self-worth.

2. Slut-shaming.
Pg. 42 she actually self-slut-shames, assuming that Declan thinks she's a 'skank-wad'

Pg. 83 Referring to Sadie: "The only boys immune to her charms were Declan and Cory, who made it clear they thought that she was shallow and stuck-up and a few other choice S-words"

Pg. 99 "Catherine has been crushing on Declan since the sixth grade. And if he didn't know it before, he does now. She pulls him toward the dance party and promptly shoves her huge boobs into his face."

(When Catherine starts grinding on his 'crotchal region') "God, could she be any more aggressive?"

And then more: "[...Cat] had to serve a suspension last year for breaking the dress code eleven days in a row. No joke. Eleven warnings, this girl had. Just put on a fucking sweater.

Pg. 119 "Sadie is already deep into not-so-deep conversation with Mike Sanders.
Her latest victim.
I mean, infatuation."
There are several other instances of her talking about Sadie where she basically says it without actually saying it, but really? Sadie has so many other things that Harper could criticize her about. Sadie is a shitty friend. But it's almost always about Sadie being a party girl and hooking up with new guys all the time. Blah.

3. The 'parent has cancer' trope.
I didn't feel like this was particularly well-written. It seemed to serve mostly as a plot device for Harper justifying her shitty behavior. Because again, it's all about how it affects HER. She doesn't even spend any time with her family. And her parents just kind of let her do whatever she wants. I get that they are going through a rough time, but if my daughter had been caught drunk in a pool with a boy I didn't know, she wouldn't be going out to a bunch of parties all summer. Anyway, I didn't feel enough for these characters to actually feel sorry for them and the situation they were going through.

4. This book doesn't feel original at all.
Aside from the fact that this book relies on a ton of tropes, it also has a very similar concept to Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson. Granted, this book is not nearly as fluffy (it's not fluffy at all) as SCS, but it's about a girl who goes back to a summer home she hadn't visited for years because her father has cancer. There she meets up with her first love, but something she did the last time she was there is keeping them apart; her own inability to deal with confrontation and difficult situations.

The only difference is that in SCS the main character actually physically runs away from confrontation and in this book Harper emotionally runs away using alcohol, drugs, and sex.

So there's first loves reuniting, parent with cancer, and a main character with an inability to deal with her emotions and tough situations. There's even a tree house that meant a lot to the characters in each book, and initials being carved in wood. There were times when it felt very similar. Again, the tone in both books is very different. TYWFA is much darker. But my main problem with this is that in comparing them, SCS was an all-around better book. The parent's illness was handled much better, and we got to know the family members better. When there were setbacks, you felt it. It mattered. The romance was more believeable and I actually rooted for the main character.

It's a bummer because as I started this book I was looking forward to it. The first 40 or so pages seemed pretty good. But Harper just could not get out of her own way long enough to actually grow the hell up. And the fact that the emphasis was put entirely on the romance I feel like was a missed opportunity, because as much as we may not want to believe it, love doesn't conquer all, and this girl had issues that no boyfriend was going to be able to fix.