Definitely not what I was expected, especially after I saw a few episodes of the TV show. I still loved it though. It's real and gritty. I think what I enjoyed most about it was that in the end, you realize that happy endings aren't always happy. I really wanted to typical happy ending for Maddie and when she relapsed I was upset, but then I realized that's the truth of her situation. Not every gets clean and stays clean, not even after seeing all the shitty things that happen because of addiction. She does eventually get clean though and what I loved about this book was that the big takeaway is sobriety is a struggle...an ugly one. This book was marketed as a love story/romance and while it is in a lot of ways, it's more than that. You see that there are different types of love and they're all fragile, especially when dealing with "broken people". Sometimes no matter how much you want to help someone, you can't...not until they are ready to help themselves.

All in all, I appreciated the darkness of this book (there's a lot of death a result of addiction) because you don't always get to see that realness in this type of book (or at least I haven't). I also appreciated that it was very atypical as far as love stories go and in the end love didn't conquer all. If it had, I think it would have taken away from the story.

I do wish we had gotten to know Stewart and his inner struggles more, but I suppose since it was told from Maddie's POV it makes sense that we didn't. I also wish that we could've seen Maddie deal with her sexual assault. It felt like it was thrown in there as a way to put a wedge between herself and Stewart and a way to show that your actions have an effect on other people, but we never really dealt with it. Again though, I guess that in a sense is real as well because so many people don't. Still I think that would have been an interesting road to take. It sort of just happened, Maddie was upset, and then she didn't mention it again.

All in all, definitely a good read.