I am back with another Monday Reviews! This week, I am reviewing Rules for 50/50 Chances by Kate McGovern. Thanks again to Raincoast Books for providing me with an eARC for review. All opinions are my own.
While I really wanted to love this book, I didn't.
I felt like the story was a little too slow and I didn't really connect with the characters. Rose was whiny and she was always changing her mind. She wanted to know, she didn't want to know. She wanted to do ballet, she didn't want to do ballet. And I get it. Sometimes you change your mind. But I just felt like she made a choice and then the next day regretted it.
I enjoyed the romance aspects of this book, but Caleb and Rose's relationship sometimes got so unnecessarily strained.
It is a diverse read, and boy does the author never let you forget it. It seemed like every issue between Caleb and Rose was racial including the severity of the illnesses faced. I enjoy with diverse characters, but between Lena and her white guy/Asian girl fetish and Caleb bringing up 3 million times the fact that he is African American, I was annoyed.
I also felt like the characters were always trying to one-up each other. "Oh, your mom has Huntington's? Well my mother AND sister's all have Sickle Cell Anemia." It was painful at times.
I don't know a lot about Huntington's so I can't speak to the accuracy of the depiction but I also know from the acknowledgments that the author doesn't know much personally and HD either, so that might play a role in her ability to portray it. I always find it interesting when authors write about an illness or something they don't have personal experience with.
This has been called the new TFiOS (which, by the way, don't even get me started on how just because it is a teen romance book, and their sick, doesn't make a book like TFiOS!), and honestly, if people are thinking that, than I need to reread TFiOS because I don't remember it being this painful.
Overall it was just ok. If you are ok with a whiny, floppy main character than you might like this but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it.