Hello everyone!
I picked this up for two main reasons: 1) It looked like a fun summer read, and 2) It gave a male POV twist to the typical summer romance.
The premise of the story is pretty simple, three guys who spend every summer together spending the last one before they move onto the next stage of life. Grayson is a football prodigy who's injured arm may cost him his scholarship to Vanderbilt. Ian has just lost his dad, a sergeant in the military who never made it back. Mike is planning on leaving the island where he lives year-round helping his parents and moving to NYC with his girlfriend, Harper, except she has called it off, again. The trio spends the summer together trying not to break the now seemingly impossible rules of the guy code: never date a friend's ex and never date a friend's sister.
I did really enjoy this book as a whole but I especially liked the male narration. I will admit that the voices of the three guys all sounded pretty much identical, in fact without the helpful banner along the side of each page, I'm not sure I would have been able to tell you who was who. BUT, this story gave an interesting insight into the male mind, something we don't get a lot of in YA, especially summer romance YA. It was refreshing to see what went on in the guys' minds, I'm taking it with a grain of salt, it is fiction after all, but I was interested to see how Brody would handle things.
I think this is a great beach read - it's basically three summer romances rolled into one and the serious issues it deals with aren't that serious. Brody addresses them: divorce, physical injury, heartbreak, slut-shaming, etc. but I never felt like they were much more than plot points, for better or for worse. They didn't take over the story, but they were talked about. I was expecting a cute summer read and that's what Brody delivered.
Like I mentioned earlier, the guys' voices all sounded pretty similar. They were their own people, obviously, but at some points, I just felt like the only thing differentiating each of them was their hobbies/personal issues. They were written like they could be three personalities of the same person in terms of voice, thoughts, some of the mannerisms. I wanted male perspectives, plural, not singular, you know?
I think my expectations were too high for this book. It was good, but I think I was expecting greatness. There was a lot of potential in this premise but this book just didn't deliver as well as I had hoped going in.
I definitely didn't hate this book, I know there are quite a few less than stellar reviews floating around. The book was cute but if you take it too seriously or expect too much from it, you'll lose interest. There were a couple moments I really enjoyed, I loved the scenes with Julie and Whitney in them the most, but overall it was a decent book. I just didn't love it.
Overall, a good summer read but nothing to gush about.