The Quick Cut: A seventeen year old girl spends the summer in Nantucket after discovering some letters from her grandmother's younger years.
A Real Review: It can be fun to learn about your past and the past that your ancestors lived through. However, just like our lives can be difficult and dramatic - so can our ancestor's lives. What would you do if you discovered something that indicated there's more than meets the eye with your grandparents? Would you be willing to put your life on hold to find out more about it? This is the situation for Abby. Abby has graduated from high school and finds herself at a crossroads. She's broken up with her first boyfriend and all of her best friends are starting down the paths to adulthood. Except Abby doesn't know what to do and feels like she doesn't have a path like the others do. Insert the unexpected: a box of her grandmother's things, with a bunch of love letters from a mysterious man. Who is this guy that she exchanged romantic letters with? How come her grandmother never told anyone about it? Abby is willing to do anything in order to find out what happened, even that far in the past. This is one that I actually borrowed from my library - I was browsing through their young adult selections and fell in love with the cover! It's colorful and really did seem to emanate the premise of the story. I couldn't help but be intrigued and interested in reading the story. Unfortunately for me, it turned out that I loved the cover far more than the actual characters or the plot. While I like the overall idea of a girl looking into her grandmother's past via love letters, the reason behind it felt very trite. She feels like she doesn't have a path and just seeing these letters motivates her to spend her summer on it? This doesn't feel like a very realistic reason to get interested in it, especially after a breakup. Spending your summers researching love letters would only remind you of the relationship that just ended, wouldn't it? Maybe I'm overthinking this. Between the setting of Nantucket and the characters of Abby and Noah, the entire thing feels quite bougie. Abby seems fairly well off and sort of spoiled in the way that her parents let her spend the summer away from home, doing what she wants. Considering the elements that get involved, the ending only further highlights that. I get that this is supposed to be about the excitement of learning about your ancestors and how it can change your future - but Abby comes off as spoiled and Noah comes off as selfish. Neither one comes off looking great at the end of this one to me and I certainly never got very invested in them as a couple. The romance between these two felt quite forced overall. What I did enjoy about this story was how much it highlighted Jewish history. It seems like everyone at some point learns in history class about the Holocaust and what the Jewish community went through in that awful time in the past. However, very rarely do we spend the time to see what happened after the Holocaust ended. Where did Jewish communities appear after the war? How did what happened during that terrible time impact them? It was fun to get an insight on one way how that played out. A cute romance that doesn't have enough chemistry or relatability. My rating: 3.75 out of 5