Main Character: Joy
Love Interest: Noah
Series: n/a
Author: Website|Facebook|Twitter|Good Reads

What’s worse than getting dumped? Not even knowing if you’ve been dumped. Joy got no goodbye, and certainly no explanation when Zan – the love of her life and the only good thing about stifling, backward Haven, Utah – unceremoniously and unexpectedly left for college a year early. Joy needs closure almost as much as she needs Zan, so she heads for California, and Zan, riding shotgun beside Zan’s former-best-friend Noah.

I picked this one up thinking it was going to be a cute road-trip novel about a girl falling for her ex-boyfriend’s best friend. It was and it wasn’t.

Joy is in her senior year and she’s still in shock that her boyfriend just up and left without saying anything to her other than he needs to get away from it all. She knows where he’s going to school but that’s about it. Basically Zan doesn’t want to be found. But Joy wants closure and she comes up with a scheme to go to his college in California and see what’s up.

Meanwhile, Zan’s best friend, Noah, has been trying to hang out with her. Noah is a Soccer Lovin’ Kid and he hangs out with the crowd that Zan didn’t like…so Joy doesn’t like them either. That’s the only reason she doesn’t want to befriend Noah. But Noah lets Joy know that Zan asked him to look out for her and so she drags him along to California (it’s his car LOL).

But once Joy gets to California, things don’t go as planned.

All right, first of all, there was a road trip in this novel but it wasn’t really a road trip story. It’s road-trip lite. So don’t go into this thinking it’s going to be on the scale of Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour. It is not – they are in totally different hemispheres. Also, Joy doesn’t even like Noah for 85% of the book. He’s one of those cute, charming boys who don’t let others get him down so he just keeps on trying to befriend her. It finally sticks when he’s there for her in a difficult situation.

Now Joy. I don’t know what it is, but this is the second character I’ve read in a YA in a relatively short period of time that I can refer to as obsessed. She was so in love with Zan and she was so lost without him. Those kind of girls get on my nerves like you wouldn’t believe. You know the girl I’m talking about, she’s nothing without a guy. That’s how Joy came across to me. Even her friends refer to her as a stalker. This is not good, she doesn’t come across as a strong character.

A pleasant surprise for me was the Mormon aspect of the book. I’m not Mormon and it was interesting for me to read about how life in Haven, Utah was. Joy was a girl who lived strongly with her faith and that was something I can get behind. She was strong there, if not anywhere else.

I’m giving Back When You Were Easier to Love a C+. It was an enjoyable read but had a weak heroine and a predictable plot.