Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Flat Out Love by Jessica Park

Summary:(from goodreads) 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.

Review: I liked this books so much more than I thought I would. When I started reading it, I didn't have that high of expectations for it. However, the plot quickly became really intriguing. This is definitely a character driven story and the plot isn't particularly action packed, but I quickly became sucked into the story. The best part about it though, was the fact that I quickly fell in love with the entire Watkins family. Erin, Roger, Matt, Celeste, even Finn were all so awesome. I also really like Julie. All the characters were fun and unique, they all had their own little quirks that made them who they are. It's obvious that this family has their fair share of issues, but it took me a long time for me to figure out what was really going on. Looking back, I almost feel like i should have known sooner.  I really loved the way the book ended. I thought it was really sweet. I am honestly going to miss all these characters. I will definitely be checking out Jessica Parks' other books.

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