Lenore Kosinski
3.5 stars — Welp, this probably wasn’t the best time to read this one because I had a bunch of life going on…but I don’t think I would have been as excited about it either way. It just wasn’t what I remembered from the first two books. And the funny thing is, I was really looking forward to Caleb’s story. But there was such…tension between Caleb and Catie, that we kind of saw Caleb not at his best, you know? I think part of my meh-ness is that it didn’t feel like a lot happened. Or, like we got told a lot of things, but I didn’t feel the connection between Cay-Cay like I wanted to. I appreciated that through these two we got to see how hard it can be for kids who feel torn between their parents’ dreams for them and their own dreams. I thought that was an interesting topic to tackle, and was probably the strongest part of the story. Both Catie and Caleb had moments of behaving a little…brattily? Does that make sense? I didn’t necessarily really like either of them. I didn’t dislike them, I guess I was just pretty indifferent. It could be partly my mood, but it wasn’t just my mood I don’t think. I enjoyed when they reminisced about being friends as kids, and their date was cute, but otherwise the romance felt very focused on the lust angle…which, well, teenagers and hormones I guess. I don’t know. I’m tired. I just didn’t connect like I did the other books, so I’m feeling unreasonably bummed.