Rowena’s review of Last Year’s Mistake by Gina Ciocca.
Before:
Kelsey and David became best friends the summer before freshman year and were inseparable ever after. Until the night a misunderstanding turned Kelsey into the school joke, and everything around her crumbled—including her friendship with David. So when Kelsey’s parents decided to move away, she couldn’t wait to start over and leave the past behind. Except, David wasn’t ready to let her go…
After:
Now it’s senior year and Kelsey has a new group of friends, genuine popularity, and a hot boyfriend. Her life is perfect. That is, until David’s family moves to town and he shakes up everything. Soon old feelings bubble to the surface and threaten to destroy Kelsey’s second chance at happiness. The more time she spends with David, the more she realizes she never truly let him go. And maybe she never wants to.
Told in alternating sections, LAST YEAR’S MISTAKE is a charming and romantic debut about loving, leaving, and letting go.
Kelsey and David are best friends and maybe things could have been more if Kelsey wasn’t moving away, leaving David behind. Whatever they could have been went up in dust when Kelsey left and didn’t keep in touch with David. Now, it’s a year later and David has moved to the same city as Kelsey and they’re going to school together…again. There are lingering resentments on both sides and over the course of the book, their story slowly unravels, so slowly that you want to punch them both in the face. Maybe do some hair pulling too.
Three different times, I wanted to put this book down for good. But I wanted to find out if things would turn around between Kelsey and David so I kept reading. The longer I read, the more pissed off I got. Kelsey was such a hard person to like. She assumed, she knew everything so you couldn’t tell her anything and she cared far too much about what other people said and thought. The entire time that I was reading her story, I kept waiting to start liking her but that never happened. Even when the whole story comes out and I understood where she was coming from, it still wasn’t enough for me to get over that hump to actually liking her.
David was a good kid but he wasn’t without his own faults. He was a teenage boy who did stupid teenage boy things and he was completely clueless about a lot of things but I felt that these two stubborn idiots wasted so much freaking time over such petty things. I only disliked David a little less because he tried a few times to stop wasting time and he was upfront about what he wanted from Kelsey, how he felt about Kelsey but Kelsey? Ugh, she made me so mad with all the waffling she did. You don’t stay with one boy because you don’t want to hurt him when you’re thinking about another boy ALL THE TIME. Ugh.
Isabel. Violet. Ryan. Ugh, those characters weren’t much better either. The only decent friend Kelsey had was Candy and I thought she was robbed of page time. We didn’t get nearly as much of her as we did the other assholes in Kelsey’s life (both past and present).
The whole book read as a teenage angst fest and while that’s not always a bad thing, these characters didn’t do anything to make me like them in the end and I doubt that I will ever read this one again. So while I didn’t absolutely hate the book, I didn’t necessarily like it either.
Grade: 2 out of 5
This book is available from Simon Pulse. You can purchase it here or here in e-format. This book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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