Wow, this book was not what I thought it was going to be. I guess I will start with the things that bothered me the least to things that bothered me the most.
To start, I did not realize that the age gap between the two characters was going to be 10 years. I thought it was going to be that Sal would be around 5 years younger than Chris, old enough to still have kind of grown up together but still young enough to be looked at as nothing more than a little sister. Instead, it felt like it could have been written as a teacher/student romance (if she had been in high school and him fresh out of college). I feel like the age gap became the least of my concerns as I got more into the novel and saw more of its problems, but it is definitely there and it is definitely offputting. Even though Chris says he never would have tried anything with her when she was younger, they do have a bit of roleplay where he says “imagine you’re seventeen, and I just can’t have enough of you” and that felt a bit gross. But in the end, neither character actually acted on any of these hidden desires until she was 37 and he was 47, so props to them!
The second weird thing was that Chris has already been with someone from the Gritt family. He had a relationship with Luke (who is closer to him in age) when they were in high school. They seem to have wrapped up that relationship and gotten over each other, but it still seems odd that Sal continued to maintain her crush on Chris when he was with her brother.
After this, there will be slight spoilers, nothing for the end of the book but through the first 20%. I think it is important to name though, to explain why I disliked the characters.
Sal is definitely immature. I don’t know how a 37-year-old can be immature, but here we are. She leads her whole family of brothers to believe that she was cheated on by her ex-boyfriend, when the truth was that SHE cheated on HIM. Rather than admitting your wrongdoing, you’d rather have your brothers ready to fight someone on sight who did nothing to ruin his relationship. She always does this, rather than admitting any wrongdoing she may have done she just allows her family to hate whoever “wrongs” her. This didn’t totally turn me off from her, but I definitely wasn’t rooting for her a ton. What truly turned me off were some of her actions in the latter parts of the novel, but I won’t spoil that.
Then, there is Jordan. I will mostly talk about his relationship with Sal here. He has a crush on Chris, and rather than telling her BEST FRIEND that she liked Chris, Sal hooks Jordan up with him. Then, months later, when they are happily together, she almost cringes every time they start PDA together. Chris thinks that it is because she doesn’t like seeing her best friend with a player like Chris, but even Jordan suspects some feelings between the two. He is painted as a bad guy for revealing the secret that Sal cheated on her boyfriend, but other than that, he had done nothing wrong. He didn’t want to lose the man he had loved once he picked up on the fact that his best friend loved Chris, and I can’t really blame him for that. Overall, I just wish that I had gotten to know his character more rather than just seeing him through Sal or Chris’ eyes.
The one thing that kept me coming back to this book was the discussion of suicide. At first, I disliked how it was originally portrayed, but then I read more and felt like the author discussed the subject in a real and raw way. I wanted to see how the characters would heal, and so I finished the novel.
Overall, this story was a good idea, but the characters totally ruined it for me. Chris and Sal weren’t likable, they seemed to prove the horrible and harmful stereotype that bisexual people cheat more often than straight people. Even as they tried to get away from the stereotype, their actions did nothing but “prove” it to be true to those around them. The characters are mean and rude to each other a lot of the time. I just don’t see the romance here, just the sexual attraction.
I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.
Overall Rating: 2 out of 5 books.
