Reviewer: Rowena 99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Publication Date: January 29, 2019
Format: eARC
Source: Edelweiss
Point-of-View: Alternating Third
Genres: Contemporary Romance
Pages: 368
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Reading Challenges: Rowena's 2019 GoodReads Challenge
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Crush: a strong and often short-lived infatuation, particularly for someone beyond your reach…
… If Darcy Barrett hadn’t met her dream man when she was eight years old, the rest of the male population wouldn’t be such a let-down. No one measures up to Tom Valeska, aka the best man on Earth, not in looks, brain or heart. Even worse is the knowledge that her twin brother Jamie saw him first, and claimed him forever as his best friend.
Tom’s off limits and loyal to her brother, 99%. One percent of Tom has had to be enough for Darcy, and her adoration has been sustained by his shy kindness. And if she’s honest, his tight t-shirts.
Now Darcy’s got three months left to get her life together before her twin insists on selling the tumble-down cottage they inherited from their grandmother. By night, she’s working in a seedy bar, shooting down lame pickups from bikers. By day, she’s sewing underwear for her best friend and wasting her award-winning photography skills on website shots of pens and novelty mugs. She’s enjoying living the messy life, and a glass of wine or ten… until that one night, when she finds a six-foot-six perfect package on her porch.
Tom’s here, he’s bearing power tools—and he’s single for the first time in a decade.
As a house flipper extraordinaire, Tom has been dispatched by Jamie to give the cottage a drastic facelift that will result in a ton of cash. Darcy doesn’t appreciate Tom’s unsentimental approach to knocking down walls, and he really, really doesn’t approve of her current burnout boyfriend. They can’t be in the same room together without sparks flying- and it’s not the faulty wiring. One bedroom wall separates them at night, and even that’s looking flimsy.
Will Tom ever see Darcy as anything other than a little-sister obstacle to get around? And can she stand up to her most formidable opponent—her twin? This time around, she’s determined to make Tom Valeska 99 percent hers, and he’s never managed to say no to her yet…
99 Percent Mine is Sally Thorne’s sophomore release and it was another enjoyable romance between two quirky characters that kept stumbling around each other until they finally get things right in the end. I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed Thorne’s first book but it was still a solid read overall.
Darcy Barrett has had a thing for Tom Valeska for a long time. He’s the perfect guy but she messed things up for herself where he was concerned because when she had the chance, she didn’t snatch him up and now he’s with someone else, engaged to someone else and Darcy isn’t over that. She stayed away from home because Tom and Meghan, the perfect couple was there and she just couldn’t be in the same room with him without everyone knowing that she still had it bad for him.
When Darcy’s grandmother passes away and leaves her house to Darcy and Darcy’s twin brother Jamie, Jamie wants to sell and Darcy wants the house. It needs to be fixed up so Darcy wasn’t all that surprised when Tom shows up at the house to fix the house. Tom is finally on his own, running his own contracting business and Darcy’s grandmother’s house is his very first project. It needs to do well so that he can build a portfolio that is his and his alone. Tom and Darcy are working on the house together and all the time that they’re spending together is making them both aware of each other and I really enjoyed seeing them work through their issues putting the past to rest and moving forward with the future.
This book was great but it did come with some problematic shit that had me scratching my head from time to time. Like the weird funky relationship that both Jamie and Darcy had with Tom. Tom was like their personal life fixer. He was the poor kid that moved in close to them and Darcy’s family adopted both him and his Mom into their family. So Tom went on family vacations with Darcy’s family, even when Darcy couldn’t go (because she has a weak heart and couldn’t do a lot of things that Jamie wanted to do) and he kind of turned himself into being the family handyman. He fixed everything that needed fixing for everyone. You find out that he does it to earn his keep, to contribute and thank the family for all that they do for him but putting that much pressure on yourself really takes its toll on him so I wondered why Darcy and Jamie let him do that for so long. They supposedly loved him so why did they make him earn their love?
Despite my issues with that part of the story, I still enjoyed the romance between Darcy and Tom. I loved seeing them come into their own over the course of the story and Sally Thorne’s humor shines in this one so I’m glad that I read it and look forward to more Sally Thorne books in the future.
Grade: 4 out of 5