One for the YA audience

The good news is that this book was well written and the narration was excellent. The bad news is that I was bored. A famous, rich and good looking (of course) football player has spent his life yearning for a girl he spent two weeks with at a summer camp, aged 17 or so. She is now a children’s cancer doctor, and when they meet after 14 years apart, she does not recognise him, even though she does remember being in love at age 16 at a summer camp. This whole scenario was just too unreal. Who obsesses for 14 years after someone they spent two weeks with as a teenager?

He constantly (and boringly) muses about how much he loves her and how perfect she is, she is (of course) the perfect children’s doctor who likes him but feels it’s “too soon” but she “remembers him from somewhere”. He worries about “coming on too strong” but within 48 hours of meeting her he has supplied a chef-catered breakfast in a car park for her friends, a tailgate barbeque and gifts for her patients, a huge birthday party, along with a vintage car, and a puppy! Seriously?

After four chapters of this, I ended up skipping through the audio and just listening to the first few minutes of each chapter, and I didn’t have a problem following the story. Because nothing much happened. Emotion was supposed to be added by a child dying of cancer who the football player and his mother semi-adopt to make her last days happy one – but her dying was just too sweet and too neat to be real. It was like a fantasy sanitised version of death and I felt the sick kids were added to the story just to show the reader how saintly all the adults were.

The start of the book did display some wonderful humour with a disastrous first date and the introduction of the H’s mother who is a fabulous character. But everyone was just too nice, apart from the obligatory villain of the h’s father, and everything just happened too easily. There was no tension, no passion, no suspense and no real “zing” to the romance. Furthermore there is nothing attractive about an h who eats massive amounts of food but never puts on weight (definitely something that only happens in a romance book!), or an H who sweats and feels like vomiting when he is nervous. She eats a lot, he gets nervous a lot. It was supposed to be funny, I didn’t get it.

This is not a particularly bad book, but I think possibly more of a YA book for those a little less cynical than me and a bit more willing to believe in fairy tales.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!