Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Wednesday Books for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book, and to be perfectly fair, I don’t think this book was written with me as the audience – and that is ok! This book is the meeting point Christian Fiction and Coming of Age\/Finding Yourself YA literature, and it leaned a little too far into the Christian world for me. Full disclosure I am not<\/strong> Christian and so a lot of the things being described at this Evangelical church were, to me, a bit extreme and I was getting angry that people still think this way in 2021. On that note though, Erin Hahn does a good job trying to counterbalance the church teachings that I am assuming are still pretty prevalent, and what the world around us has become – especially after reading her Author’s Note at the end of the book I can appreciate the efforts more. That being said, I definitely felt a lot of disgust(?) at some of the beliefs that were being spouted at these young and impressionable women, and I know they are still common in society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Getting past some of the icky Christian feelings I had (again, not the target audience with this connection), the “finding oneself” story that was told through Micah and Meg was really sweet and genuine for 18\/19 year-olds. They both had pretty big traumatic issues they were working through, and their growth in this book was realistic and impressive for their age. I loved all of the background characters (I would fight anyone who makes fun of Duke’s hair or entire being), and it was nice to see Vada again from More Than Maybe. This was an easy enough read, I was able to finish it within a day, and while it was quick to read it didn’t shy away from emotional topics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Overall, this was an enjoyable book, but one I probably won’t pick up again just because it was a little preachy at times for me, and some of the Christianity aspects made me uncomfortable. But I know that there are some people out there that will really connect with this book & find it important in their lives, and that is good too. 4\/5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Wednesday Books for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book, and to be perfectly fair, I don’t think this book was written with me as the audience – and that is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastpagepromise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}