When high school senior Kelsey's identical twin sister, Michelle, dies in a car crash, Kelsey is left without her other half. The only person who doesn't know about the tragedy is Michelle's boyfriend, Peter, recently deployed to Afghanistan. But when Kelsey finally connects with Peter online, she can't bear to tell him the truth. Active duty has taken its toll, and Peter, thinking that Kelsey is Michelle, says that seeing her is the one thing keeping him alive. Caught up in the moment, Kelsey has no choice: She lets Peter believe that she is her sister.
As Kelsey keeps up the act, she crosses the line from pretend to real. Soon, Kelsey can't deny that she's falling, hard, for the one boy she shouldn't want.
My Review
Author: Lara Avery
Pages: 320
Publisher: Poppy
Publication Date: July 7, 2015
Source: Library
I honestly don’t even know why I’m so angry. Actually, I’m nauseated. I cannot deal with how this story progressed.
Right off the bat, we have a very touchy topic. Kelsey’s sister Michelle dies while her boyfriend, Peter, is deployed. Struggling with the loss of her twin, Kelsey responds to Peter’s Skype and decides that she has to act like her sister to get Peter through the deployment and things get complicated, of course.
What happened to Michelle was sad, but I didn’t feel the brunt of it because I didn’t even know her and she died in the first few chapters. Instead, I was left with an immature Kelsey who threw all her friends, boyfriend and family away to then toy with someone’s feelings.
I think, Kelsey is sick. Very sick and struggling severely with Michelle’s death. Her lack of regard for others’ time, money and emotions was beyond my comprehension. How blind, self-centered and grief-stricken do you have to be to ignore right and wrong?
As for Peter, he was sweet, the perfect forever boyfriend type but he didn’t have any growth and wasn’t very interesting. In fact, all of the secondary and tertiary characters were flat. Non-existent parents except for in the background and to preach in the end, non-existent school except to fill in the time-slot in a day, and the predictable role set out for Peter’s sister was unrealistic.
Stories about basically catfishing someone are hard to swallow but I was ready to if there was more of a story arc with Peter and Kelsey as themselves coming to terms with Michelle's death, Kelsey's catfishing, and Peters military duties. Instead, lengthy duration of the cat fishing exceeded my tolerance level and I can’t forgive Kelsey. She had several chances and she blew them with weak excuses. In the end all of the falling action, growth and preaching was condensed into maybe 20 pages, resulting in lost realism and notching my enjoyment level down dramatically.
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