Rowena’s review of 17 First Kisses by Rachael Allen.
No matter how many boys Claire kisses, she can’t seem to find a decent boyfriend. Someone who wouldn’t rather date her gorgeous best friend, Megan. Someone who won’t freak out when he learns about the tragedy her family still hasn’t recovered from. Someone whose kisses can carry her away from her backwoods town for one fleeting moment.
Until Claire meets Luke.
But Megan is falling for Luke, too, and if there’s one thing Claire knows for sure, it’s that Megan’s pretty much irresistible.
With true love and best friendship on the line, Claire suddenly has everything to lose. And what she learns—about her crush, her friends, and most of all herself—makes the choices even harder.
In her moving debut, Rachael Allen brilliantly captures the complexities of friendship, the struggles of self-discovery, and the difficulties of trying to find love in high school. Fans of Sarah Ockler, Susane Colasanti, and Stephanie Perkins will fall head over heels for this addictive, heartfelt, and often hilarious modern love story.
This sounded like a cute, summer romance kind of book so I was excited to read it. I expected a summer romance novel for teens but what I got was completely different.
This book is about 17 different first kisses with different guys. Claire, our main character shares her kissing history with us and I thought it was an interesting way to tell this story. But that’s not all this story is about. It’s about Claire’s life, the people around her and her relationships with her best friend, Megan.
This wasn’t an easy book to get into and that had nothing to do with the writing style. The writing style flowed well and made it easy to follow along the story but what made it hard to get through was, Claire. Claire isn’t the easiest person to relate to…but she did feel real. My daughter is close to Claire’s age (a few years younger, but still) and when she’s telling me about her day at school, her friends at school, they all sound just like Claire. They’re not the easiest people to like but for some reason, you like them anyway. I didn’t always understand Claire’s thinking but in the end, I liked her.
There’s a lot about this book that I didn’t understand but the biggest thing I didn’t understand was Claire’s friendship with Megan. They’re best friends and yet, twice…a boy has come between them. They don’t know, or don’t understand the girl code about exes being off limits. They hurt each other (on purpose) and yet, they forgave each other and continued on, being best friends. Who needs enemies when you’ve got friends like Megan? Was Megan all bad? No, of course not but she did things to Claire (who, later does the exact same thing that hurt her so much when Megan did it to her) that no best friend should ever do and yet, Claire kept her around. I didn’t understand it but in the end, they made right by each other so I got over their treatment of each other.
I knew who the love interest was in the beginning of the book and I’m really bummed that he didn’t get a lot of page time. I wanted more from him and I wanted to see the dynamic between him and Claire, just more. What we did see was great but when the book ended, it left me feeling unsatisfied…because I didn’t feel like we got enough closure with everything. Had we gotten just a bit more from the love interest, more caring between the two best friends, I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more than I did. I will say that the whole 17 First Kisses thing was cute. I liked reading about each of Claire’s first kisses with the different boys and I was a bit bummed that things didn’t work out with the band guy. I felt like he was completely sorry for what happened and even though he was a douche for doing what he did, I didn’t hate him.
Still, this book had the potential to be great and while there were great moments in the book, there were a lot of moments when I rolled my eyes and was left, wanting more.
Grade: 2.5 out of 5
This book is available from Harper Teen. You can purchase it here or here in e-format. This book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.