Friday, August 23, 2013

Just Like Fate by Cat Patrick and Suzanne Young

Publisher: Simon Pulse
Publication Date: August 27th 2013
Pages: 304
Source: ALA Annual
Genre: Contemporary, Split Decision, Romance
Goodreads

Caroline is at a crossroads. Her grandmother is sick, maybe dying. Like the rest of her family, Caroline's been at Gram's bedside since her stroke. With the pressure building, all Caroline wants to do is escape--both her family and the reality of Gram's failing health. So when Caroline's best friend offers to take her to a party one fateful Friday night, she must choose: stay by Gram's side, or go to the party and live her life.

The consequence of this one decision will split Caroline's fate into two separate paths--and she's about to live them both.

Friendships are tested and family drama hits an all-new high as Caroline attempts to rebuild old relationships, and even make a few new ones. If she stays, her longtime crush, Joel, might finally notice her, but if she goes, Chris, the charming college boy, might prove to be everything she's ever wanted.

Though there are two distinct ways for her fate to unfold, there is only one happy ending...

I was extremely excited to read this book once I read the back. This book sounded a lot like one of my favorite books this year, Pivot Point, so I was very excited to see how this book would turn out. What I didn't realize reading this book would do was create a very hard review to write. This book is extremely hard for me to review without heavily comparing it to Pivot Point, but I will try my best to break away from comparisons.

It's really hard for me to say how I felt about each character. Depending on the future I had different feelings for each of the characters, and my feelings morphed as the story went on in both directions.

Right away when I started this book the first thing I noticed was that it moves extremely fast. Most books start out by easing readers into the story, but instead this book hit the ground running. This book didn't take much time in the first few chapters to introduce characters or help get a feel for the situation or just the feel of the book. Instead this book pretty much forced the reader to jump in and catch up a little later. This was a bit of a hard book to start.

Things started to get easier to get into in the book once the choices split. I kind of like how simple the decision was that the main character made, and I liked seeing how things branched off from there.

At the very beginning of both futures I thought I knew which choice I liked better, but then something would change and I kept changing my mind. I loved that I was always second guessing myself and changing my opinion about the story. Pretty much one choice gives her a better life with her family with really terrible boyfriend, while the other gives her a better boyfriend, and a not so good relationship with her family.

One of the most interesting things about this book was how it ended. The story ends leaving the story fairly open without much of a concrete explanation to which path she took. I thought that way of ending the story was really interesting and I liked it.

1 comment:

  1. I agree!! The beginning started out a little quickly and it was a bit hard at first to separate story lines, but they soon diverged enough to tell which was which :)
    I LOVED the ending, I think mostly because I wasn't expecting that. I think that was perfectly handled!
    So glad you enjoyed it!

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