I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect this book to be very good. I mean, my first ARC? Why would a big company like Penguin Teen Australia hand a good book over to a nobody arts student? But Kissing In America defied my expectations and was overall a really enjoyable read. I cared about the characters, I cringed when things went bad, I even teared up a little near the end.
I’ve read a lot of contemporary romances, both YA and adult, and there are some trends that make me wince. For the first few chapters, I was concerned that Kissing In America would be one of those books. It’s not. It takes a while to prove it, but it has its own style.
The protagonist, Eva, is very cute. She’s shy, gets good grades, she loves torrid romances, and her dad died. I cared about her from the very beginning. I was with this book for Eva, much more than for her love interest, Will. Will is nice enough, but he does feel rather like someone pulled Young Adult Love Interest traits out of a bag like they were scrabble tiles. He’s sporty, attractive, intelligent, deep, happens to have a set of issues that coincide perfectly with Eva’s. He loves his mum and has a turbulent relationship with his dad. He just seems to be absolutely perfect. He doesn’t need all these traits to make him desirable. I mean, he works at a cupcake bakery. That’s enough for me.
I expected the road trip plot to begin a lot earlier than it did. Since it was such a focus of the blurb, I assumed that most of the book would be a road trip journey of finding yourself and learning about love. And, well, the road trip was a journey of finding oneself and learning about love. But that’s not really the focus of the narrative. It’s about grief. But that doesn’t make a fun blurb.
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