Book Review: FLAT-OUT LOVE by Jessica Park

Flat-Out Love

Author: Jessica Parker

Published: April 11th 2011

Format: Kindle Edition

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary

Summary | Add to TBR | Get it here!

Flat-Out Love is a warm and witty novel of family love and dysfunction, deep heartache and raw vulnerability, with a bit of mystery and one whopping, knock-you-to-your-knees romance.

Something is seriously off in the Watkins home. And Julie Seagle, college freshman, small-town Ohio transplant, and the newest resident of this Boston house, is determined to get to the bottom of it.

When Julie's off-campus housing falls through, her mother's old college roommate, Erin Watkins, invites her to move in. The parents, Erin and Roger, are welcoming, but emotionally distant and academically driven to eccentric extremes. The middle child, Matt, is an MIT tech geek with a sweet side ... and the social skills of a spool of USB cable. The youngest, Celeste, is a frighteningly bright but freakishly fastidious 13-year-old who hauls around a life-sized cardboard cutout of her oldest brother almost everywhere she goes.

And there's that oldest brother, Finn: funny, gorgeous, smart, sensitive, almost emotionally available. Geographically? Definitely unavailable. That's because Finn is traveling the world and surfacing only for random Facebook chats, e-mails, and status updates. Before long, through late-night exchanges of disembodied text, he begins to stir something tender and silly and maybe even a little bit sexy in Julie's suddenly lonesome soul.

To Julie, the emotionally scrambled members of the Watkins family add up to something that ... well ... doesn't quite add up. Not until she forces a buried secret to the surface, eliciting a dramatic confrontation that threatens to tear the fragile Watkins family apart, does she get her answer.

Flat-Out Love comes complete with emails, Facebook status updates, and instant messages.

My Thoughts:

This review will be short. Simply because I won't be able to tell everything without giving away too much. I don't want to spoil the book for you just in case you decided to read it. 

I loved Flat-Out Love. I love Matt. I love Finn. I love Julie. I love Celeste. I absolutely enjoyed reading about these fantastic characters--from the Watkins family to Julie. Every character is something, and it's a book that I want to read again. And again. And again.

Flat-Out Love is one of the best contemporary books I've ever read. The reviews didn't let me down! Now I understand why there are so many readers who loved this book. And I mean *love* this book.

"We move to the edge of the plane again and pause. You cross your arms over your chest and lean your head back into me like I told you. I start to rock us back and forth, getting us ready to jump. And then we go."

The Watkins family is, well, kind of different. Something is off, and Julie is determined to find out what it is--the reason why Celeste is carrying a life-size cardboard cut-out of Finn, and why Matt is overly protective of her. The secret of Erin's family is so intriguing that it didn't let me put the book even when I knew that I badly needed sleep. Even though I have things figured out, I was still so anxiously flipping the page...after page...after page. I want to see how everything played out and it end up beautifully. The story is absolutely stunning, it's nothing like I've read before. The romance... Oh the romance! That's the very best thing I enjoyed about this book. I just loved how everything has been executed. I loved the Facebook statuses, I loved the instant messages between Finn and Julie. It was so entertaining, I was drawn in. I giggled a lot, a smiled hugely, I laughed out loud. It kept me awake until past three in the morning and I didn't regret it. I finished it in one day!

"I reach between us and release the buckles that holding us together. This is when I really panic. The ride up in the plane didn't scare me. Or the height, or the jump, or the noise. None of that scared me. Right now, only one thing does.
I'm terrified that when I undo that buckle and release you, that you'll get up and walk away from me. I can't think of anything more excruciating."

Beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking, and overall captivating. With a dysfunctional family to live with, problems and issues to deal with, and a blossoming romance with an emotionally-available-yet-geographically-unavailable guy, Flat-Out Love will steal your heart in all the right places. I highly recommend this book. Read it. Please *wink*.

"Then I ask you to ignore everything you think you know and to listen only to your heart, without doubting anything. Can you do that?"

"Of course I can."

"Then I kiss you, and I make you feel everything that I feel."

My Rating: