Thursday, February 23, 2012

Kiss Crush Collide by Christina Meredith

Kiss Crush Collide
By Christina Meredith
ARC received from HarperTeen
Reviewed by Sis-in-law Sarah


Kiss 
What Leah did—only she really shouldn’t have—one hot night at a country club party.
Crush 
What Leah has—only she really shouldn’t have—on the guy with the green eyes, the guy who is not her perfect boyfriend, the guy who does not fit in her picture-perfect life, the guy her sisters will only mock and her mother will never approve of. Not in a million years.
Collide 
What happens when everything you always thought you wanted—having cool friends, being class valedictorian and homecoming queen—runs smack into everything it turns out you really do want.
Kiss. Crush. Collide.
For Leah and Porter, summer is only the beginning.

Summary from barnesandnoble.com

When I picked up this book, I was looking for a quick read that still had me falling in love with the characters, and that's exactly what I got with this one!

Leah is THAT popular girl.  You know the one...the one that everything seems to just magically happen for her without her seemingly having to lift a finger.  She has the perfect family (her mother has made sure that everyone knows this too...after all, appearances ARE everything), the perfect grades (easy to do when you're the youngest of three and your two older sisters were valedictorians), the perfect boyfriend (he's popular too...that's all that matters, right?)  Like I said...the perfect life.  And she hates it.  But then again, wouldn't you?  Even though we all still tend to fall into the trap of believing attaining the perfect blah-blah-blah will make us truly happy, we've seen over and over again that this simply doesn't work.

So, Leah finds the solution to quitting her perfect life...and he has crazy gorgeous green eyes.  And what a romance fling this is!!!  I really enjoyed the story of Leah and Porter...how they find each other and use each other to escape their, though totally opposite, equally imprisoning lives.

Yet, my favorite part about this book is all the family dynamics.  Leah has two older sisters.  Being from a family of three girls (as are Big Sis Amy and Baby Sis Brittany), I could identify with so much of the dynamics between them.  Now, I will say they kind of have a mucho crazy mom, which, thankfully, I do not.  But the dynamics between three sisters was very familiar!  It's the job of the oldest to plow the way through for the younger ones, the job of the middle to bend the rules just a little, and the job of the youngest to find that path that makes her just a little different from the others so she is not just the last sister in a line of three.  Throughout the book, Leah is trying to figure out who she is, because she is not sure if the life of the older two is what she wants.  I loved having this new perspective...as Leah is the youngest and I am the oldest.  I felt like it gave me a little insight into being the baby of the family!

I'd definitely recommend this one, especially if you're looking for that quick weekend read!  And I know the cover looks especially juicy (or, as my baby sister exclaimed when she saw it sitting on my coffee table, "Sarah! What KIND of books are you reading?!?!), but this one's relatively clean with a few steamy makeout scenes and some talk about sex.