Reviews: Isla and the Happily Ever After / Open Road Summer

Seeing as how I’m feeling super lazy and unmotivated, you’re getting two short reviews rather than one full length one. I’m going to forego including the book summaries (like I said, lazy), but the hyperlinked titles below will take you to the Goodreads summaries, if you’re interested.

“Isla and the Happily Ever After,” by Stephanie Perkins:

Here’s the story. I really love “Anna and the French Kiss” and I mostly love “Lola and the Boy Next Door.” But this one . . . it’s not that I didn’t like it. I DID. But it didn’t leave me feeling as giddy at the end as the other two did, which kinda lowered it in my estimation by comparison. But here are the two things I really like about the book: 1) Isla has a totally platonic friendship with a boy. None of that we’ve always been friends, but I’m secretly pining over you biz. 2) I like that Isla and Josh get together fairly early in the book. This gave the book time to develop their relationship in a way YAs don’t often get to. Here, we get to see how their relationship evolves after the “I love yous.”

Rating: 3.5 / 5

“Open Road Summer,” by Emery Lord:

This one was fun. I appreciated that Reagan was tough without being an A-hole. I also liked that she started making changes in her life before Matt comes into the picture; it made me believe that she was doing it for herself rather than for a boy. Another thing in the book’s favor was that although Matt and Reagan’s romance is a big part, a substantial part is also about Reagan and Dee’s friendship. They felt like real best friends rather than the superficial treatment friendship usually gets in YA. Also, I don’t know why, but I totally imagined the characters looking like specific celebrities. This basically never happens to me. But the whole book I imagined Reagan as looking like Lucy Hale, Matt as Scotty McCreery, and Dee as Taylor Swift.

Rating: 4 / 5