My rating: ⭐⭐
From the cover:
"Kate’s father has been pressuring her to be perfect for her whole life, pushing her to be the best swimmer she can be. But when Kate finds her dad cheating on her mom, Kate’s perfect world comes crashing down, and Kate is forced to leave home and the swim team she's been a part of her whole life.
Now in a new home, new school, and faced with the prospect of starting over, Kate isn't so sure that swimming is what she wants anymore. But when she decides to quit, her whole world seems to fall apart. But when Kate gets to know Michael, the cute boy that lives across the hall, she starts to think that starting over might not be so bad. There's only one problem: Michael has a girlfriend.
As the pressures of love, family, and success press down on her, can Kate keep her head above water?"
While there were small portions of this that I enjoyed, I think my favorite thing about it was that it was short enough to finish reading in a few hours on my plane ride to Washington DC. Just reading the synopsis clues you in on what the book will be like--kind of choppy, not always very well thought out, and a little repetitive.
This book had a lot going on. Kate's dad cheats on her mom, resulting in chapter one: Kate moves to Portland with her mom. In the aftermath of The Affair, we get Kate despising her dad and quitting swimming because everything good about it is now outweighed by the bad. We also see Kate alternately worrying about her mom and her mom basically not existing, Kate helping her sister leave her husband-to-be at the alter and then watching her obviously struggle with depression. We meet Michael and learn about his mom's bad health. We discover, after Kate has fallen hard in a matter of minutes for him, that Michael is dating Patrice, *gasp* one of the two girls Kate met in her first five minutes at school and almost immediately became best friends with. After this revelation, we are repeatedly treated to Kate's conflicting emotions over wanting to be friends with Patrice versus wanting to be with Michael...although if we're being real, this is more Kate lamenting the fact that Patrice is dating Michael so she can't be. Finally, throughout the book, we are witness to Kate struggling to keep her relationship with her long-time best friend alive after it immediately fell apart the second she moved. With so many big conflicts, there wasn't enough time to devote to all of it, and it left everything feeling rushed and under-developed.
Then, of course, there's Kate being the shittiest friend ever. After she meets Patrice, the reader is treated to multiple references to how unbelievably kind she is. Kate not only finds out Patrice is dating Michael, she later learns from Michael's best friend that the poor girl has been into him for basically her whole life. Then Michael dumps Patrice after she stays with him all night at the hospital and within a matter of hours declares his feelings for Kate and makes out with her in his kitchen. Later that day, Kate spends time with Patrice and sees how upset she is. She tells Michael about it, and Michael says that they can wait a bit to start dating if Kate thinks it would be better for Patrice. Kate, in true amazing friend form, is like, "nah, dude, why should I wait to spare my friend's feelings? Let's do this thing." Like.......are we supposed to feel bad for her when Patrice calls her out and everyone is being mean to her? I do feel bad for her when the swim team calls her a slut, because that's pretty much always a fucked up thing to do to someone, but beyond that...Kate was a total dick. She kinda had it coming.
Next up...Michael being described as "too nice" to break up with Patrice even though he didn't have, and had never had, feelings for her, as though this makes him some kind of fucking white knight. Ugh. Just no. It's not a nice thing to agree to go out with someone that you don't like. It's not nice to continue dating them so you can use them when you're bummed out about your mom and ignore them the rest of the time. It's not nice to not break up with someone that you don't care about to spare their feelings. Nothing about that situation made him a nice guy, and it floors me that Kate was privy to Patrice's side of their relationship and didn't have a problem with it. What's more, I think the book would have been better without the needless, forced bit of love triangle drama. Why must we constantly pit two girls against each other in a quest for the same guy? Why is this such a go-to conflict? Be more creative.
I could go on and on about the things in this book that got under my skin, but it feels like overkill. At the end of the day...I was intrigued by the premise of this book, but it squandered its potential. With so many amazing books out there, this one is lackluster. There are better options out there. Read one of those.
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