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Abandoned by Booklikes

Government drone by day and book lover and geek girl by night!

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This Time Next Year
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This Side of Infinity

This Side of Infinity - Emily    Martin UGHHHHHHHHH.

Okay that's out of my system.

I just don't have a lot of patience for novels like this. I am all for flawed main characters, but the main protagonist Harper is not just flawed. She's aggravating, selfish, lies, is self absorbed and also solely fixated on the character of Declan. I just kept hoping for something, anything to redeem this character in my eyes and nope, she just kept on sucking til the end. I will add that sometimes having a flawed main character can still make a great book. Unfortunately that didn't happen here at all.

The Year We Fell Apart is told in the first person by Harper Sloan. The summer before Harper is about to start her senior year in high school and readers are alerted to something happening a couple of months ago that has left Harper in trouble with her parents and her kicked off the swim team.

Harper is still broken hearted after the end of her friendship with one of her best friend's Declan a few months earlier. It is slowly revealed though that Harper and Declan were not just best friends's they eventually became more and then Harper ended things.

We find out pretty quickly that Harper is in essence a drama queen.

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Harper is exhausting. When you find out why her relationship with Declan ended you will roll your eyes. Everything with her is magnified by 100. And happy days, everything is about her.

We get a reveal about a person's death close to Declan, and nope Harper still talks about how this person dying affected her and caused her to get obsessed about people pulling away and leaving her.

She reminds me of a friend that I know that always has to re-up someone's story when talking. If you tell her that you were late because you got a flat tire, she is the type of person that will tell you that she was late one time for three hours because ninjas came out of nowhere and started a fight in downtown Washington, D.C.

The other characters in this book are paper thin. I think that Martin wanted to showcase some things here, but nothing worked at all. Harper's other best friends Sadie and Cory are given very little to do besides enable and or disapprove of her behavior.

The character of Declan was just a mess. I liked him though because at least he told Harper about herself once that had me cheering. I think the main issue with him is that because this story was told in the first person we don't get any insight into Declan that is not foisted upon us by Harper. And Harper we already know is flawed which makes me think her perfect recollections of how great Declan are, are not true either.

I wish that we had gotten more interactions between Harper and her family. Her family is going through a major upheaval in the book and it's barely given any thought here and there except when to move the plot along.

The writing was painful. I am usually always a fan of first person narratives in stories like this because it makes it more intimate for me as a reader. I like third person when we have more characters involved in a story so that way you don't feel like you are jumping in and out of everyone's heads. However, this time I would have preferred third person narration. We could have included other characters in this story like Declan or even Cory so we weren't so immersed in Harper's brain the whole time. There is only so much inner-angst that I can stand in this book and at about the halfway mark I was over it.

Further, things are slowly revealed at such a glacial place that the flow of the book is wrecked at about the halfway point. We also get an 11th hour reveal about things towards the last 5 percent of the book that actually made me laugh. Frankly I was disappointed with the author's decision to throw that little wrinkle in there. I really didn't get what Harper was so angsty about then with her whole don't tell Declan or he will hate me forever nonsense.

The ending left things on a totally off note. I think I was supposed to think deep thoughts but instead I was just thinking that Harper needs to think about getting a therapist.