Flat-Out Love Review

Flat-Out Love

Jessica Park

April 2011

 Goodreads description:

Something is seriously off in the Watkins home. And Julie Seagle, college freshman, small-town Ohio transplant, and the newest resident of this Boston house, is determined to get to the bottom of it. When Julie's off-campus housing falls through, her mother's old college roommate, Erin Watkins, invites her to move in. The parents, Erin and Roger, are welcoming, but emotionally distant and academically driven to eccentric extremes. The middle child, Matt, is an MIT tech geek with a sweet side... and the social skills of a spool of USB cable. The youngest, Celeste, is a frighteningly bright but freakishly fastidious 13-year-old who hauls around a life-sized cardboard cutout of her oldest brother almost everywhere she goes.

And there's that oldest brother, Finn: funny, gorgeous, smart, sensitive, almost emotionally available. Geographically? Definitely unavailable. That's because Finn is traveling the world and surfacing only for random Facebook chats, e-mails, and status updates. Before long, through late-night exchanges of disembodied text, he begins to stir something tender and silly and maybe even a little bit sexy in Julie's suddenly lonesome soul.

To Julie, the emotionally scrambled members of the Watkins family add up to something that ... well... doesn't quite add up. Not until she forces a buried secret to the surface, eliciting a dramatic confrontation that threatens to tear the fragile Watkins family apart, does she get her answer.Flat-Out Love comes complete with emails, Facebook status updates, and instant messages.

I'm not going to say much about this book for fear of ruining it, but let's just say that this is one worth reading. By now, I'm sure plenty of you have already read this book. I've seen it on many different New Adult lists and lots of my Goodreads friends have given it tremendous ratings/reviews. It didn't surprise me that this book was just amazing as everyone said, but I'm still really glad that I loved it anyway. You won't regret this one! (or at least I don't think you will)

Julie was an amazing character. I loved how sarcastic and genuinely snarky she was about everything. Her sense of humor and pop culture references made me instantly love her. While she was pretty feisty, she also had a sweet side, especially when it comes to 13-year-old Celeste. I loved the scenes that those two shared, and watching them bond as Julie gets the younger girl out of her shell just a little bit more. Matt was a geek, but in the most endearing since of the word. In spite of his geekiness, (or maybe because of it) I thought he was a brilliant and charming love interest. His behavior towards Julie was strange and off-putting initially, but he gradually became a character that I warmed up too. Like Julie, his love for Celeste is very obvious. I just loved his character all around.

The romance part of this book is a little bit complicated and I don't want to spill too much for anyway that has yet to read the story. I'll just say that there isn't all that many REALLY romantic scenes in the book, but the few that are? Let's just say that those are brilliantly written by Park and they are steamy but in the most tasteful and refined way possible. Julie doesn't go further than kissing in this book, but the scenes still have really great romance in the pages regardless.

I predicted the secret pretty early on in the book. However, a part of me was just not wanting it to be true since I was so invested in the characters. Park really has such descriptive and real characters that you can't help but love. This was a story that really got to me. I have a huge thing for books that have incredibly romantic main male characters and this one certainly covers that with ease. My boy Matt has the most geeky and hilarious shirts, he also is a serious computer geek, and I just loved him. Did anyone else who read this book absolutely adore Matty?