Odeya Bello is your average high schooler just trying to survive senior year unscathed. She has a supportive family, an eccentric group of friends, and according to her, a normally boring life. Theo Ashford had everything he could ever wish for in his lifetime. He had a successful career that was only manifesting by the day, but he always felt as if something was missed. One day he stumbled across that one thing by complete accident, her. Odeya and Theo were opposites in so many ways, but a whirlwind of fate threw them together and they didn’t want to change a thing. They had their fair share of obstacles along the way, but as lies unfold, and more bumps in the road form, things only get harder. Will they be able to overcome insecurities and deception, or will it tear them apart for good?
Poorly written, immature characters, and terrible plot
First, I just couldn’t finish this book. Between a plot that was flimsier than gossamer, characters that are very immature and one-dimensional, the complete lack of editing, and the terrible writing, there was no way I could go on. This book is 400 pages too long. Even if you could suspend reality long enough to pretend that a pop star would randomly start talking to a fan who sent him a rude tweet, and then twitter-stalk her as she constantly says she doesn’t want to talk to him, even though she is a super fan with a massive crush on him, the rest of the book is still not good enough to finish. It’s literally that bad. The two main characters are selfish, extremely immature, and are written to constantly second guess themselves into being whimpering fools. And the girl is a complete a$$#ole! I’m not going to bother explaining the many, many major plot holes, because I don’t even care enough about this book to remember most of them. Last, the lack of editing is enough to drive anyone crazy. Misspellings galore, sentences that make absolutely no sense, and so many common phrases that are wrong left me confused and irritated.The last one I read was the bodyguard/driver telling the couple, “Let’s blow this pop stand!” Pop stand. Pop. Stand. Really?! POPSICLE STAND. Let’s blow this POPSICLE stand! There were enough of these mistakes, words being used incorrectly, and other simple grammatical errors that it frequently made it difficult to keep reading. There are a million other ways to spend your time; don’t waste a single moment on this drivel.
2.5 This book had a lot of promise for me... but I felt like I was dragging myself through it. I read the lingo as more young teens than an 18-20 year old couple, plus the older parents and siblings seemed to talk the same or similar; there weren’t different voices. Everyone seemed to have the immaturity level of a preteen or freshman aged person. Which can be absolutely fine to have, but for some of the things happening I felt there should have been more of a maturity level or at least acting their age. STILL, I read on. Halfway through I was getting annoyed with the personalities but I wanted to see if anything would change, since I still felt I hadn’t gotten to the climax of the book. As I read on, I honestly didn’t want to finish it because of how I was feeling about the characters and what was happening. Now that I have finished it, I’d like the hours of reading it took to get through this, back. I would try another book by this author, but not in this series. There were bits of romance, and lots of cheesiness, but it just wasn’t for me.
**** I normally don’t base my reviews on editing, I’m not and editor and I know things happen, but this book has some things that should be gone back over and republished. Sometimes the text is in present, others in past, and there were some sentences that had a word that made it sound like the author changed her mind halfway through. It just needs a bit of a clean up.
This book was so great, it inspired me to start writing my own with a friend. Even though there were some grammar and spelling errors, it did not take anything away from the story's plot. I love reading romantic novels because they give me hope that I, too, can find someone who will love me for me. The dianamic of the main characters' relationship is exactly what I look for when searching Wattpad and bookstores for a good teen novel. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, and will be waiting for more books by Ally Williams.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
While this is not a 5-star read in my opinion, this book does hold a special place in my heart. The first time I read this book was when it had first come out of Wattpad, where I would wait for the the new updates, and got the chance to read about Odeya Bello's relationship with the one and only Harry Styles.
However, re-reading this book and this time reading about Odeya and Theo Ashford (the harry replacement) I realized how special this book meant to me, and I'm so happy I got to support Ally Williams throughout her Wattpad-Author turned Published-Author journey.
I would give this a 3.5. I felt like this was a pretty typical story for this genre. It was easy to read and I read it pretty quickly because I wanted to see what would happen next. No spoilers, I kind of saw where the ending was going, but I almost feel like it was a little too abrupt. I definitely want to read the follow up chapter to see if it expands on the ending a bit.