Review: Because I Love You by Tori Rigby

From Goodreads:
Eight weeks after sixteen-year-old Andie Hamilton gives her virginity to her best friend, “the stick” says she’s pregnant. 

Her friends treat her like she’s carrying the plague, her classmates torture and ridicule her, and the boy she thought loved her doesn’t even care. Afraid to experience the next seven months alone, she turns to her ex-boyfriend, Neil Donaghue, a dark-haired, blue-eyed player. With him, she finds comfort and the support she desperately needs to make the hardest decision of her life: whether or not to keep the baby.

Then a tragic accident leads Andie to discover Neil’s keeping a secret that could dramatically alter their lives, and she's forced to make a choice. But after hearing her son’s heartbeat for the first time, she doesn’t know how she’ll ever be able to let go.





My Thoughts:
This is one of the rare times I'm inclined to give something an extra half star. I didn't enjoy it enough to give it four stars, but I didn't not enjoy it enough for three. It definitely kept me interested and I kept going right until the end, so something about it caught me. But there were just so many... well, flaws I guess.
This comes across as a teen pregnancy book. It's really not. It's a romance with a girl who happens to be pregnant which makes her finally get past herself and notices a boy. The details about doctor visits, and symptoms, and sensations make it pretty clear the author has never had a baby before.
The stuff at the beginning with her peers feels pretty accurate. I can see her friends and the father running away at sixteen years old. This was the best part of the book, the early stages where she has to deal with the teen pregnancy and the consequences.
The rest gets kind of... off. When you're pregnant, you think about being pregnant ALL THE TIME. Andie, the MC, is more concerned with boys, and friends, and parents, and drama, and the third trimester and labor is brushed over and poorly represented, which are probably the hardest parts of the whole forty weeks.
I did like the romance. I think that was what kept me going. Niel was a pretty strong, thoughtful, and interesting character. 
I also read this as an audible, and the voice irritated me! Haha! I wouldn't let that deter me from the story though. Most audio voices are a bit on the annoying side.

All up, it had good points and bad, but I did finish it, which says quite a bit when I have so many other books I need to read!