Forbidden Boy by Hailey Abbott

Title: Forbidden Boy
Author: Hailey Abbott
Format: Paperback, 256 pages
Pub. Date: April 22nd 2008
Source: Cover2Cover blog

★

One star.

It's summer, and Julianne has some serious plans for fun and relaxation. She's going to try and ignore the tensions at home.... Mansions are being put up each and every day, and the owners are trying to bully the family into selling their home to be part of another vast expansion that they don't need. Their newest neighbors are especially pushy, but who needs them? She's got her projects, and her beach, and summer is calling her name. That is until she meets this dreamy boy, Remi. She's so excited and smitten, but there's one problem- Remi is the son of their bullying neighbors. What's a girl to do, and what's the cost of the perfect summer romance?

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I don't really know where to begin, but I'm going to try and keep this short and professional. Even though I'm raging on the inside and want to rant for the rest of my review.

-The relationship Julianne has with her sister in this story is ludicrous. Who are all of these authors that think that sisters are either absolute best friends or sworn enemies? There is a middle ground, you know. Her sister tries to get her to make out with boys in order to relive stress, and Julianna doesn't find this at all strange or intrusive. Ew. Maybe it's just me, but if my sister was like that, I'd probably flip her off and walk away, not grab a beer and have a giggle fest.

-All of the conversations in this book sound forced and fake. The slang between characters is awful, like something in a Saturday Night Live skit. I never bought into the realism that this realistic fiction eluded to, and preferred the plot when no one was talking.

-The title of this book is Forbidden Boy. That would lead the reader to assume that a boy is, well. Forbidden. I enjoy this type of romance. Take the book [book:Forbidden|7600924], where the lovers in question are brother and sister. Or even Romeo and Juliet, which also involved feuding neighbors. Only, they'd die. That makes their love a bit more forbidden. Just a smidge. This has cranky neighbors. There's nothing forbidden about him. Frowned upon, perhaps. But this isn't at all my definition of "forbidden."

-Instant love. That magical moment when everything in the universe aligns and a boy and a girl, in the most hormone filled time of their life, know that everything will be perfect with that other person. Sigh.

+The cover is pretty. I give it that.

All in all I found this to be a bad attempt at a quick beach/summer read. Maybe I'm just getting old or maybe it's because I'm not a "prep", but I didn't care much for this at all. I'd recommend it for maybe the younger end of young adult. If you read true forbidden romance, or are any kind of alternative stereotype (goth, punk, what have you), I would skip this.

Thank you to Cover2Cover blog for my copy.

Barbie Girl by Heidi Acosta

Title: Barbie Girl (Baby Doll #1)
Author: Heidi Acosta
Format: ebook
Pub. Date: November 1st 2012
Source: Word Spelunking blog

★★

2 Stars.

Barbie is trash. Her mom works at a strip club, and the whole school thinks that she's a whore. She lets them think it's true, because all she really cares about is getting her little brother away from her mom and out of town. It's for him that she suffers through school and her small Alabama town. Dylan is a nerd who wants nothing more than to be with Katie. So, he makes a deal with the blonde devil herself. She'll help him snag the girl, if he helps tutor her. Only, things don't necessarily go as planned....

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This review is going to be short and sweet, because I don't have much to say.

I only made it about halfway through this book. There were some glaring issues that I had with it that limited my enjoyment of the novel, and made me unwilling to put the time forward to read it start to finish.

-The biggest of these issues for me was the grammar. There was an extreme under-use of commas, making the text read like run on sentences. Either that, or the sentences were choppy and too short. I even noticed one instance where an entire word was missing, "No wonder he is love with her." It's not an isolated mistake, but one of many.

-On a similar note, I found the dialog between these high school aged characters to be too proper. There were almost no contractions. I understand that it makes your writing seem better, and that it lengthens the pages. But I don't know many high schoolers who say "I do not know what you mean" or "I am not quite sure." Sure, it's proper English, but it made the youth sound older and robotic. I'm sure this is my own personal preference, however.

-+The next issue is neither positive nor negative, and is about the chapters. They alternate between the two main characters' perspectives, Dylan and Barbie. Only, there's no indication that there's a switch in POV. All of a sudden, I was really confused as to why Dylan was thinking about being a stripper at his mom's work. It took me a few paragraphs to realize that, oh, it's a Barbie chapter now. I got used to it, but at first it was quite muddling.

-I didn't like Dylan at all. Actually, he's kind of a really big douche bag. I wouldn't have wanted to help him do anything, if I were Barbie.

+With all that aside, I DID like the character Barbie. She's sassy and a bit of a rebel who's protecting a gooey emotional center deep down in her slutty looking heart. I read a blog post by the author that said she pictured Taylor Momsen as Barbie, and I was pleasantly surprised by this. That's who I pictured in this role too.

+The cover is cute. I would have picked this up in a heartbeat off of the shelf. I like the font and the image is eye catching.

All in all, this is a complicated book to rate. I think that this story could be really good, assuming that all the technical errors are cleaned up. If an editor or big publisher gets a hold of this and tidies it up, I will gladly give this book another try, and even revise my rating if I feel that it's improved (which I firmly believe would be the case). But for right now, I'm only rating based on what I was given, and sadly it wasn't enough.

Thank you to Word Spelunking blog for my copy of this book.