Puddle Jumping

“Talking with you would be much more enjoyable than talking with Talia, Lilly.” His eyes scanned the floor by my feet. “She's paint by number; you're a watercolor.”

I hate to be the odd one out here, as everyone seems to adore it, but this was kind of awful for me. I didn't absolutely hate it but I couldn't wait to be done with it after about halfway in, and it's only 121 pages long.

You see, I was very excited about this book since I'd read that one of the protagonists has Asperger's and I am pretty fascinated with the topic. I researched it heavily when I first learned about it, I've seen a couple of documentaries and films about it and just a few months ago I read another contemporary romance who's protagonist is very likely to be on the spectrum. That book is called The Rosie Project and it was a lot better done, that's for sure.

As for this, the writing was ... let's say unpolished. Lily was supposedly about 19 when she was telling the story, but she sounded like a 14 year-old. There were so many odd metaphors like <>“Christmas lights dropped in the puddle of water” used to describe the way she was feeling when she saw Colton. The overuse of the word “ass” also really bugged me: “badass”, “wierdass”, “ I talied his ass”, “ I dragged my ass out” etc. She then refers to the girls from her school with “bitches”, just because they dared to say that Colton was cute and they smiled at him. And these are just some of the things that make her sound like a hillbilly.

I was also put off by the fact that she didn't have a life and she was so obsessed with him that it made her look rather unhinged. It's not like they had anything in common or that she fell in love with him gradually. She just obsessed over him since she was nine because he was special. And because she felt a hole in her heart for 7 years after he had saved her life during one of their play-dates when they were kids. And when she saw him, after a few years, he was really hot and that made her, previously dormant, ladyparts tingle. The way she expresses her feelings made me cringe so badly, it was like she had handpicked lines from the cheesiest rom-coms on TV.

I didn't feel I was reading a story about the power of love or a story about overcoming adversities but one about a bored girl, who doesn't have any hobbies or plans for the future, who sees a beautiful boy and she wants to take him to bed. And they lived happily ever after.

Colton, I don't know how I feel about him, because he was barely there. There were countless neurotic descriptions of how much she wants/loves him, how much it hurts to breath when he's not around, how she loves the sound of his voice even though she doesn't understand most of the things he's saying. But basically, the only things we know about him are that he is a sweet, polite boy, who paints beautifully and who's very happy to have his lips attached to Lilly's. That's about it. Lilly was too busy patting herself on the back for being such a saint to fall in love with an autistic person or too concerned about how she could squeeze some more kissing/groping sessions to allow us to get to know him better.

And now it's time for one of my favorite quotes from the book.

“I think sometimes we're presented with the truth but we don't want to believe it. We see things the way we want to see them. Sometimes, we choose to live in denial.”

Thank you, captain obvious!

The end.