Author: Jessica Park
Publisher: Self Published
Publish Date: April 11, 2011
Source: Crazy Book Tours
Why You're Reading This Book?:
- You're a YA fan.
- You like a little mystery.
- You like a little romance.
From Goodreads.com: "Something is seriously off in the Watkins home. And Julie Seagle, college freshman, small-town Ohio transplant, and the newest resident of this Boston house, is determined to get to the bottom of it.
When Julie's off-campus housing falls through, her mother's old college roommate, Erin Watkins, invites her to move in. The parents, Erin and Roger, are welcoming, but emotionally distant and academically driven to eccentric extremes. The middle child, Matt, is an MIT tech geek with a sweet side ... and the social skills of a spool of USB cable. The youngest, Celeste, is a frighteningly bright but freakishly fastidious 13-year-old who hauls around a life-sized cardboard cutout of her oldest brother almost everywhere she goes.
And there's that oldest brother, Finn: funny, gorgeous, smart, sensitive, almost emotionally available. Geographically? Definitely unavailable. That's because Finn is traveling the world and surfacing only for random Facebook chats, e-mails, and status updates. Before long, through late-night exchanges of disembodied text, he begins to stir something tender and silly and maybe even a little bit sexy in Julie's suddenly lonesome soul.
To Julie, the emotionally scrambled members of the Watkins family add up to something that ... well ... doesn't quite add up. Not until she forces a buried secret to the surface, eliciting a dramatic confrontation that threatens to tear the fragile Watkins family apart, does she get her answer."
My Two Cents:
Oh man, I had to fight with myself to not try to read this book too quickly. I didn't want it to end (the mark of a really good book). Julie moves into her mom's old college roommate's house with her and her family. Off the bat, Julie notices something is wrong with the family. They all seem to be living different lives under the same roof. There's a mystery here but Julie doesn't know if she'll figure out what's going on.
I kind of figured out what was going on pretty early in the book but the secret is so strange and interesting, I couldn't help but keep reading to figure out what was really going on and how everything was going to come together. Park does a great job of giving hints little by little. I kind of want to go back and read the book again to see if there were any hints that I missed.
I really, really liked how the dialogue was written. I thought Park did a great job capturing the different voices of all the characters. I also really liked how Park was able to incorporate using Julie, Finn and Matt's Facebook statuses to set the scene of each chapter.
This is a great book for YA lovers. I think you're in for a real treat.
Bottom line: This is a fun read with sparkling dialogue and characters that you will really fall in love with.
This sounds like a fantastic read! I've never heard of it before but Flat Out Love sounds like my kind of book...adding to my TBR now!
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like an enchanting book!
ReplyDeleteSo glad you loved the book! Thanks for being part of the tour!
ReplyDeleteJen
I flat out loved Flat Out Love.
ReplyDeleteThis story is so well written it pulled me right into it. I started thinking about it being one of my daughters going off to school and how they would react if their housing fell through and they were hundreds of miles away. I felt an immediate personal attachment to Julie. Thankfully she was a very mature college freshman because she was dropped into a very extraordinary situation.