aislinghelen's Reviews (1.01k)

The writing style wasn’t for me. It felt like middle grade rather than YA and just moved a bit too slow for me.

This was incredibly interesting. It was also a very hard read at points. She explains her time as an SOE agent in France working undercover as a 14 year old (when she was 23) during WW2. 

There is a lot explained more broadly about how the allies worked and how being undercover worked, it’s tied into her story. 

This was really interesting and a great perspective. It’s a very short read. I love her writing style and the anecdotes that she includes 

I read this because I love gilmore girls but there was so much more in here. From her starting ballet to dancing professionally to broadway and beyond, as well as all her friendships, romances and pets. This was a really interesting book but it was also inspiring. I love her attitude and the way she approaches everything. She’s so positive and makes sure to see the upsides to almost everything. 

This was a friends to lovers. I know some people dislike that trope because it feels creepy when the guy has loved her their whole friendship, and in this case he has but he genuinely wanted to be friends with her and never expected or tried for more. 

It felt very realistic, and honestly that kind of made me dislike it a bit. That’s probably just a me thing though. It showed their whole friendship, but in a bit of a jumpy around way, so it felt like you were getting to know them like you would with new friends. At parts I did want it just to keep going in the present rather than jumping back but it did add depth to the story.

I listened to the audio, and I would recommend not doing that. The narrator was a man who had to do an accent for the MMC and the weird high pitched voice for the FMC and it just didn’t work well.

Ok, so this started off good. It was a little fast moving but I really enjoyed Maisie and Gio together.  Gio is an F1 racer and Maisie is a sports psychology student and formerly a mountain bike racer but she left the sport after a bad crash. There was a couple of points that annoyed me like the miscommunications that resulted in blow up arguments but overall, the start was great. Ava, Maisie’s F1 obsessed bestie, is probably my favourite character and I wish we got more of her.

Then there was the rest of it. I have a theory with F1 romance that they are all either great with the romance and bad with the F1 or great with the F1 and poor on the romance. This was the latter.

Everything was miscommunication, they were fake dating with a contract in place and yet somehow broke up like 3 times. He was not capable of being in a realtionship at all, he never communicated, shut everyone out and was generally really immature. She was a psychology student who didnt think, was really naive and blew everything out of proportion. 

The rest of this is going to have a lot of spoilers because otherwise it will just be criptic and weird. Read them if you want to.

Miscommunication is the bain of my fucking existience along with another little romance book cliche:

the third act break up

.

There was a third act break up and it was the part that annoyed me the most. He got injured so she flew out to see him. He was angry that he would miss a race, and tried to insist that he could drive with a sprained ankle. She agreed with medical advice and said he needed to miss it. He got pissed and they fought and broke up.

Things really blew up right at the end with a tonne of stupid decisions on both their parts. 

The last one especially annoyed me. There was a weird psychology to blame her and make him look better thing going on in this book but quite frankly it was just stupid.

She runs into her advisor at the supermarket and they go out to coffee where theydiscuss the final break up. The advisor is a psychologist and asks maisie if anyone asked for her opinion about Gio racing (which no one did but she said she agreed because thats how conversations work and it was an incredibly normal thing to say in that situation especially considering her trauma???) It was very weird and the whole converstation was basically, “Maisie it was your fault not his” when that was not the case.

Anyway. Rant over. 

And I was thinking my biggest issues were going to be that it moved a bit too fast and that the author was trying to hard to create confict in the relationship. 

This was such a fun read (although Raven would probably be upset at me for saying that). Theres a serial murder mystery, supernatural grudges, government corruption, and an on-the-run roadtrip. I really hope we get more books in this series, I need books for Milo, Cordelia, Blaine etc. 

My only complaint was that I wanted more revenge. What can I say? I’m vengeful and not enough people got what they had coming. I wanted more of a wrap up, even just a “here’s where they are now” type of thing

specifically wanted a “the news retracted evrything it said about Raven and Lacey is now in prison for running a pyramid scheme that wasnt even very successful”.

Just couldnt get into it

I wanted to love it. Her books are really either love em or hate em for me, and this just wasn’t going the way I needed it to. I wanted more of their relationship and the tension but kept getting other people pushing them together or overstepping boundaries. Raven in particular annoyed me in this. Anyway, I decided to check reviews to see if it was going to be more of them or if the pushy ones were in it a lot. Instead most of the reviews said that it goes down hill from 40% and things get worse later in the book.

The biggest thing that made me give up was that Sierra kept saying that she hated him and had good reasons but never stuck to it. And everyone around her just ignored what she was saying and kept pushing them together. I wanted tension and longing and “fuck it” but got “well, maybe everyone’s right” and her being treated like a child and him being obsessed but also annoying and unable to admit his mistakes. Seriously, everything he ever did is just written off as “he was so in love”.

This was very cute. I love much  their personalities were showcased throughout the book. Faye’s chapters started with a through status update (to do lists, check ins, notes etc) and Sam’s all started with song lyrics. I will be honest I did mostly skip over the  lyrics that were in this, I just struggle with songs in books, I find them a bit cringey. 

This whole thing was very cute though. I loved how they started and grew together rather than changing to fit each other. Some of the drama felt a bit underdone

wanted more revenge against her ex

. But mostly this was fantastic.