Trusting You & Other Lies by Nicole Williams | ARC Review

Title: Trusting You & Other Lies
Author: Nicole Williams
Publisher: Crown Books for Young Children
Publication Date: June 20th, 2017
Source: NetGalley
Buy the Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository

USA Today and New York Times bestselling author Nicole Williams delivers a seductive summer romance worth swooning over. Perfect for fans of Sarah Dessen and Stephanie Perkins. Phoenix can’t imagine anything worse than being shipped off to family summer camp. Her parents have been fighting for the past two years—do they seriously think being crammed in a cabin with Phoenix and her little brother, Harry, will make things better? On top of that, Phoenix is stuck training with Callum—the head counselor who is seriously cute but a complete know-it-all. His hot-cold attitude means he’s impossible to figure out—and even harder to rely on. But despite her better judgment, Phoenix is attracted to Callum. And he’s promising Phoenix a summer she’ll never forget. Can she trust him? Or is this just another lie?

What I thought

  I requested this book because it's summer and I'm in the mood for all of the light contemporaries this world has to offer (my bank account can be a witness to this fact) and so when I saw this book over at Netgalley, I figured, hey why not? Now that we've all established that I'm romantically frustrated we can move on to my thoughts on this book.

I liked this book, but I wasn't the biggest fan. It was enjoyable and light and all those things I was expecting to, but I wish it had been just that. Instead the book tried to mix in some class issues (which handled correctly I wouldn't have minded) and I wasn't the biggest fan of the way they were handled and I also wished the family topic had been deeper and gone over in more detail**. At times, the characters felt too written* and they did very out of character things. It wasn't very consistent, which irked me. That being said, I felt like the ending was too rushed and the character development too abrupt and again, it just irked me.

*does this make sense? like they weren't real people and you could tell they were fictional and it just sort of rubbed me the wrong way
**I live for them touching family scenes and I wish this book had had more of those.

It is a cute contemporary book and it does tell the story of a girl and a boy and how they become better people because of each other, and usually I'm down for that, but I couldn't really get into Phoenix's and Callum's relationship. MY heart just wasn't in it. I did not feel the butterflies. I only smiled like once when they were together and it was because it involved sort of sexy times and I was in a car with my parents, which made me feel like I was twelve and secretly reading about sex.

All in all, this book was enjoyable and a fast read but I wasn't the biggest fan. I didn't squeal and I wasn't all that invested in the characters or the story and I just wish it had been more. It had potential, but in my opinion, it fell kind of short.