As usual, I bought this book quite a while ago and have been putting off reading it after seeing a few rather questionable reviews on goodreads, but in the end I just decided to give it a try for myself to see what the controversy was about. The book...it was ok, nothing to write home about but not terrible. It did that thing where it was average the whole way through then had a tear-jerker of an ending that makes you think the whole book was great when in actuality only the ending was and that really gets on my nerves.
So we have Camryn Bennett, a 20 year old who is fed up with her monotonous regular going-nowhere life where she works at a department store. Her boyfriend Ian died from a tragic car accident while they were in high school, her parents divorced, her brother Cole went to prison for killing a man during a drunk accident, and her best friend since second grade accuses her of being a lying bitch. So basically her life is shit. She decides it's time to quit living for everyone else...and start living for herself. And so she does. She sets out to leave North Carolina on a road trip to Idaho. When she gets on a bus and starts her new found self-discovery...everything changes.
I don't know whether it's just because I've been in a major reading slump right now or what but to most people this book it like marmite: you love it or you hate it. But this book, it was just a bit 'eh.' It was nothing special. The first half of the book was in all honesty a bit of a drag but all of a sudden it picks up pace and then lets be honest, if the author cut out a lot of the first half of the book and instead developed what was the potential for a remarkably good ending that fell short, this could have been a much better book.
I disliked the protagonist. I vehemently disliked her. Cam is the kind of perfect girl men start fights for and best friends get jealous of because their boyfriends have wanted her from 7th grade. I could NOT understand what guys saw in this waste of human cells. I'll refrain from saying more about her, because she's just not worth the effort. Check out this little gem : "My hair is the kind of blonde some girls pay a salon a lot of money to have, and it stops just to the middle of my back. I admit I was lucky in the perfect hair department." Camryn is a fucking idiot. There's no nicer way to say it. She thinks every girl who isn't her is a slut, every man who she doesn't fancy is a rapist and believed depression was something people made up for attention.So she decides to do the most mature thing ever and run away, destination unknown, on a bus without telling anyone. Because, apparently, running away from problems that aren't so problematic if she actually talked to people is the answer to everything. By page five, I'd rolled my eyes hard enough to irritate a nerve, thanks to little gems like this:
Instead of sitting around dreaming up new sex positions, as Natalie often does about Damon, her boyfriend of five years, I dream about things that really matter. What the air in other countries feels like on my skin, how the ocean smells, why the sound of rain makes me gasp. 'You're so deep, Camryn' Damon always says.
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