Review
18 year old austistic Jasper is headed home for the Christmas holidays – she hasn’t been back for 18 months. She’s been away at university, studying (or not studying) a course she hates, one that was mandated by her parents. She’s decided that she won’t be returning, and will do interior design as she always wanted to do instead, but she can’t yet bring herself to tell her controlling mum or her appeasing dad… and definitely not her tyrannical sister Christine. But she’s happy to be back in Lake Pristine, a Stars Hollow-like community that thinks the world of her.
Things start happening as soon as she arrives. Christine gets engaged, with a New Year’s Eve wedding only a month away – she demands that Jasper help organise it. Her mum wants Jasper to run her ballet school’s annual production of The Nutcracker. Jasper needs to spend time repairing her relationship with her former best friend Odette. And she needs a job to save money to pay for her design course – her parents have made it clear that there will be no money for any course but the one they picked.
Then there’s Arthur – tall, grumpy, good looking Arthur, whose family runs the town cinema. She doesn’t know what she did to make him hate her, but as they run into each other through various town activities, she starts to feel… quite differently towards him.
*
I enjoyed the start of this very much – great premise – then it started to annoy me a bit. The pacing was a bit off. I think it’s too long, and there’s just not enough romance in it for a rom-com. More romantic breadcrumbs, please! And I enjoyed the ending. But there’s a long bit in the middle where it all seems a bit tedious, like stuff you have to get through to get to the ending. Jasper is autistic (as is the author) – good representation of that.
368 pp. of small-ish type. Year 7+, kissing only, though some very mild innuendo.
*
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I listened to this novel via my school library — support your library!
