I’ll probably be in the minority here, but I really just did not like this book. Like at all.
Now don’t get me wrong––I really wanted to enjoy this book. It has all the elements that I would usually like––and I genuinely expected to love this book: city girl out of her depth, moving to a new area, she meets a local, grumpy, guy…this book should’ve been right up my alley.
I think my main issue with the book wasn’t the premise—but the execution.
Right off the bat, we’re introduce to our protagonist, Calla. She’s twenty-six years old, and from Toronto—she’s a total city girl and she hasn’t seen her dad since she was two, which was when she and her mom moved out of Alaska.
One night, she gets a call from a lady named Agnes, who tells her that her father, Wren, has lung cancer, and that she should come out and spend some time with her dad, should things go wrong. So, Calla does exactly as she says, and ends up flying out for a week, to get to know her dad, and potentially form a relationship.
When she gets there, she meets a guy named Jonah, who works for her father––and is also a massive dick.
My main issue with this book, is the way the author went about developing the relationship between Calla and her father, and Calla and Jonah.
First, I’ll talk about the relationship between Calla and Wren. Calla has not seen Wren since she was two––and she hasn’t spoken to him in about twelve years.
My main problem is that everyone––including Jonah––is blaming Calla for her lack of a relationship with Wren. Wren was her parent––he had twenty-four years to build a relationship with her, and he didn’t. Throughout the book we get snippets of Calla letting us know how much she craved that relationship, but at the end of the day, she was a kid. Wren was her father, and he didn’t fix things between them. Calla had a bunch of rightly justified anger towards him, that I wish the author developed. We are sort of supposed to just get over the fact that Wren completely failed her as a parent, and I did not like it at all.
My other issue with this book, was the relationship between Calla and Jonah. I think that I hated this, because I hated Jonah. He was a total asshole to our heroine, for basically no other reason, other than the fact that he saw her Instagram pictures? The second he meets her, he purposefully loses her luggage, just because he doesn’t like her. He is constantly telling her that she is fake, and that she wears too much makeup and looks better with no makeup, and what? This is supposed to be romantic?
I didn’t like how he was shaming women for getting their nails done and wearing makeup––if a girl wants to get her nails done, let her get her damn nails done.
A lot of people didn’t like the ending, and how open it was, but I couldn’t really bring myself to care about these characters and their relationship, let alone the ending of this book.
All in all, I was very disappointed in this book. It definitely wasn’t the worst thing that I’ve read, but I really would not recommend.
Rating ➳ 1.5/5 stars
(tw: cancer, abandoment death, grief)
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