★★★★★
Release Date: April 11, 2011
Age: YA
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Realistic Fiction, Family, College, Drama
Format: paperback
Source: Purchased
Buy it: Amazon
Flat-Out Love is a warm and witty novel of family love and dysfunction, deep heartache and raw vulnerability, with a bit of mystery and one whopping, knock-you-to-your-knees romance.
Something is seriously off in the Watkins home. And Julie Seagle, college freshman, small-town Ohio transplant, and the newest resident of this Boston house, is determined to get to the bottom of it.
When Julie's off-campus housing falls through, her mother's old college roommate, Erin Watkins, invites her to move in. The parents, Erin and Roger, are welcoming, but emotionally distant and academically driven to eccentric extremes. The middle child, Matt, is an MIT tech geek with a sweet side ... and the social skills of a spool of USB cable. The youngest, Celeste, is a frighteningly bright but freakishly fastidious 13-year-old who hauls around a life-sized cardboard cutout of her oldest brother almost everywhere she goes.
And there's that oldest brother, Finn: funny, gorgeous, smart, sensitive, almost emotionally available. Geographically? Definitely unavailable. That's because Finn is traveling the world and surfacing only for random Facebook chats, e-mails, and status updates. Before long, through late-night exchanges of disembodied text, he begins to stir something tender and silly and maybe even a little bit sexy in Julie's suddenly lonesome soul.
To Julie, the emotionally scrambled members of the Watkins family add up to something that ... well ... doesn't quite add up. Not until she forces a buried secret to the surface, eliciting a dramatic confrontation that threatens to tear the fragile Watkins family apart, does she get her answer.
Flat-Out Love comes complete with emails, Facebook status updates, and instant messages.
Flat-Out Love is a beautifully broken romance, a turbulent family drama, and one of the most touching stories of all time. Every character in this book is flawed, every person is real, and every person is absolutely positively breathtaking. Jessica Park succeeded in creating an unforgettable story that I was thinking about for days after finishing. It features a mind boggling twist of events that left my jaw on the ground and my heart leaping out of my chest. I absolutely wouldn't have had it any other way!
Flat Finn and his adventures captured my tortured heart. Jessica Park expertly takes on serious matters and does so carefully and colorfully. I enjoyed the emails throughout the book. But, it was everything from the thoughtfulness-to the love-to the awkward moments-to the earth shattering revelations made this book one of the best. I love to laugh; and, laugh I did at this quirky, fun, and realistic journey. But, as life often is, the book is filled with imperfect events, mistakes, heartache, and so much more. It is truly a magnificent read that everyone should experience!
I loved this book, too! <3 This story was so heartbreaking.
ReplyDelete