Jennifer Echols is the author of a well-appreciated number of touching romances for both MTV and Simon RomCom, but FORGET YOU felt sadly short in my opinion. I never fully felt a connection to and between the characters, and the the plot was jerky and disorienting more often than satisfying.
It's hard to get a read on Zoey. One minute she seems self-assured and capable of figuring out her own problems; the next, she's flipping out, desperately and stubbornly repeating her emanations that she's "with Brandon", and then practically manipulating Doug's help for whatever thing she needs next. I was left simply feeling confused, then irritated, that she was so inconsistent, her motivations so opaque.
I felt like I was in a fog for nearly the whole time I was reading this book. I found myself constantly having to stop, think "What the heck just happened?" and going back to reread the paragraph. I'm not asking for perfect clarity from a story, of course, but I DO want motivations and events to be believable and understandable. In FORGET YOU, I had trouble believing that. Zoey's far from perfect--she can be downright cruel and inconsiderate at times--and that's okay, but I just couldn't qualify her reasoning for being so. The why's in this book were not answered as well as I wanted.
FORGET YOU is a brave attempt to break a lot of YA conventions, but it fell short in many areas for me. However, this will not deter me from reading Jennifer Echols' other works, and this doesn't mean that FORGET YOU is a bad book. It is simply a challenging one to be engaged with.
It's hard to get a read on Zoey. One minute she seems self-assured and capable of figuring out her own problems; the next, she's flipping out, desperately and stubbornly repeating her emanations that she's "with Brandon", and then practically manipulating Doug's help for whatever thing she needs next. I was left simply feeling confused, then irritated, that she was so inconsistent, her motivations so opaque.
I felt like I was in a fog for nearly the whole time I was reading this book. I found myself constantly having to stop, think "What the heck just happened?" and going back to reread the paragraph. I'm not asking for perfect clarity from a story, of course, but I DO want motivations and events to be believable and understandable. In FORGET YOU, I had trouble believing that. Zoey's far from perfect--she can be downright cruel and inconsiderate at times--and that's okay, but I just couldn't qualify her reasoning for being so. The why's in this book were not answered as well as I wanted.
FORGET YOU is a brave attempt to break a lot of YA conventions, but it fell short in many areas for me. However, this will not deter me from reading Jennifer Echols' other works, and this doesn't mean that FORGET YOU is a bad book. It is simply a challenging one to be engaged with.
