Book Review: Heartbeat - Elizabeth Scott

Title: Heartbeat
Author: Elizabeth Scott

Release Date: January 28th 2014

Publisher: HarlequinTEEN

Age Group: Young Adult

Source: NetGalley

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Life. Death. And... Love?

Emma would give anything to talk to her mother one last time. Tell her about her slipping grades, her anger with her stepfather, and the boy with the bad reputation who might be the only one Emma can be herself with.

But Emma can't tell her mother anything. Because her mother is brain-dead and being kept alive by machines for the baby growing inside her.

Meeting bad-boy Caleb Harrison wouldn't have interested Old Emma. But New Emma - the one who exists in a fog of grief, who no longer cares about school, whose only social outlet is her best friend Olivia - New Emma is startled by the connection she and Caleb forge.

Feeling her own heart beat again wakes Emma from the grief that has grayed her existence. Is there hope for life after death - and maybe, for love?

I genuinely feel like a black sheep when it comes to this book because all of my blogger friends loved it, and it's sad because I really thought I would too. I wanted this book to get to me, I tried so hard, but neither Emma's grief nor her understanding with Caleb touched me in any way. In the end, Heartbeat was a huge confusion. It took its time making sense, and by then it was too late to salvage it for me.

Emma, the main character, is not easy to love. I couldn't even like her. She was so blinded by grief that it made her selfish and I really, whole-heartedly hated her. I was like, what do you want your stepdad to do, let your infant brother die in your mother's womb when there was a chance he could live? When you know it took two years for her to get pregnant? 

"I - look, I do get that it didn't choose for Mom to die. But she did, you know? And the doctors say the embolism didn't happen because she was pregnant but it's just..."

Her constant argument with her stepdad was "Oh, how do you know she wants to be kept alive by machines so she can have the baby? Did you get to ask her that before she went into a coma, huh?" WTF? Although I do get where she's coming from - I would have wanted a say in my mother's well-being, too - the whole time I wished someone would smack some sense into her, that part of her grief was the guilt of being so focused on her grades, on herself, and thought a good future mattered most, until life took away what really did.

"But me... you've said you won't get rid of me, but that's all. And I get it, I do. You've got a baby coming, and I was just part of the deal with Mom. You can forget me, and you did because when she died, you didn't talk to me about anything. You never even looked at me."

Is she jealous of the baby? Does she feel like she lost her stepdad too when her mother died? Do you see now why this book confused me?!

I also didn't appreciate Emma's relationship with Caleb because it just didn't seem believable to me. What, because she found someone who shares the same kind of grief as hers, there's suddenly a ray of sunshine in her life? Is that what she really wanted but didn't get so she pushed her stepdad away: sympathy? Emma and Caleb's being together could have easily gone down the wrong road where they self-destruct whilst holding hands - good thing this is fiction. But even though they weren't realistic enough for me, there's no denying that they are sweet and good for each other.

He made me see all of him, everything, and I want to keep looking.

Now, maybe you think this book is all bad, but it's not actually. I really liked Emma's best friend Olivia who was there for her through it all, the good and the bad. Olivia knew when she needed to get Emma talking and when she needed to distract her and take her mind off of things, and I think if not for her, Emma probably would have gone insane. I also liked Emma's stepdad who seriously deserves a trophy for being the most patient and understanding stepdad ever. He never hated her even when she kept pushing him away and taking even more out of him. I'd commend the writing but seeing as I didn't get any feels from this book... maybe not.

So. There you go. Very early on, I knew Heartbeat was not for me, and it's good that this book is short or I wouldn't have finished it altogether. This could have worked for me even without making me like Emma, but it didn't, so I really can't recommend it to anyone.

MY FAVORITE PART was drunk!Emma. That was fun. 

RATING:

Book Review: Anything to Have You - Paige Harbison

Title: Anything to Have You

Author: Paige Harbison

Release Date: January 28th 2014

Publisher: HarlequinTEEN

Age Group: Young Adult

Source: NetGalley

Goodreads | Amazon | The Book Depository

Nothing should come between best friends, not even boys. ESPECIALLY not boys.

Natalie and Brooke have had each other's backs forever. Natalie is the quiet one, college bound and happy to stay home and watch old movies. Brooke is the movie—the life of every party, the girl everyone wants to be.

Then it happens—one crazy night that Natalie can't remember and Brooke's boyfriend, Aiden, can't forget. Suddenly there's a question mark in Natalie and Brooke's friendship that tests everything they thought they knew about each other and has both girls discovering what true friendship really means.

I hate it when my liking of the characters affects my rating for the book, but that's just not something I can control. I rate books based on how much I enjoyed them so if I hated the characters enough to not have fun reading, then it's going downhill from there. And trust me, I can hate characters but still enjoy the book.

I knew Anything to Have You wouldn't amaze me as soon as I read the first chapter. The MCs, who were supposed to be best friends, just went on and on about how one was wasting her hot teenage girl genes by being unsociable while the other went after everything with male genitals. I was like, seriously? At this point, I only kept reading because of the absurdity, and also because I'd already DNF-ed quite a handful of books this past month.

This portrayal of teens annoyed me because every single of them were simple-minded and seemed like their only agenda in life was to get laid. Well, except for Natalie, of course, because she was so busy being Little Miss Perfect who was above the stupid baboons she hung out with - yes, said stupid baboons includes her best friend. And you know what's worse? I actually liked those baboons better than her because at least they knew what they wanted and could say no to what they didn't, unlike her who couldn't even refuse a drink because she 'felt the need to please everyone'.

And then she wakes up after a night of partying, with nothing on but her best friend's boyfriend's sweater, her underwear, and the certainty that she had sex with someone - and because she blacked out some time in the middle of her night, she wasn't sure who she had sex with or if the guy used protection, but of course she worries more over the fact that Brooke would be furious if she learns about Natalie waking up next to her boyfriend. Unbe-bloody-lievable. Oh and no, she doesn't even bother to take a pregnancy test. (You see where this is going?)

After that re-entry into the cool partying scene, Natalie is suddenly Little Miss Perfect and Popular, and I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that this girl was universally liked, this girl whose thoughts were so fake and judgmental. But hey, she just proved herself worthy of Brooke's boyfriend because Aiden was equally fake and judgmental, not to mention a fucking rapist because he had sex with Natalie when, if he was as smart as this book said he was, he very well knew that she was way beyond inebriated (but this is perfectly fine because Natalie loves him anyway! *gags*). They both didn't deserve to be so loved by Brooke because at least she was perfectly aware of everything she's doing wrong, unlike Natalie who thought so high of herself that she couldn't even figure out for sure what her mistakes were e.g. flirting with her best friend's boyfriend, and unlike Aiden who didn't have the balls to fess up.

But I didn't just hate Anything to Have You because of the characters;  it also had something to do with how, overall, this book read like a shitty first draft that saw little to no editing. But here are some good things about it, if you're one for positivity: 1) Brooke, because I really liked her and her arc, and 2) because no matter how awful this book was, I still couldn't stop reading, but even then that was mostly because I wanted to see Natalie get what she deserved. Oh, and just what is the title's relation to this story?

MY FAVORITE PART was the epilogue. Why? Because there was no sign of Natalie in it.

RATING: