I recently read the book 'Betting on you' by Lynn Painter. I have read two of her books before this, but this one is by far my favourite.
The book is about this girl that has two pretty recently divorced parents and she has a hard time dealing with it. She meets this guy on a plane years before the story starts and she and the guy really don't like each other. The girl starts working in this new place in town with her best friend and there she sees the guy again and finds out that they'll be working together. She and the guy make a bet regarding the fact that two people of the opposite gender can be just friends or not.
I liked the story a lot, it explored the two opposite situations after a divorce really well. The guy has a step-father who he really hates and that tries to take over the house and the role of father. But the girl's mom has boyfriend who just tries to get to know her and tries to be empathetic to her feelings, but she is scared of change and doesn't really accept it for a long while. Even though I have two parents who are happily married and very in love with each other I did really like how well the characters portrayed the feelings kids go through after a divorce. I know a lot of people that have divorced parents and who struggle with the sam things that these characters did, so it was nice that it got translated so well into the books.
I also really liked how the two main characters are so extremely different yet similar in so many ways. The girl is very open and honest, but also extremely naive and trusting towards her friends. But the guy is so distrusting and extremely damaged in every way. The two kind of cancel each other out, it's as if making each other try to understand their personal point of view makes them accept that there's an in between and not everyone is good, but also not everyone is bad.
The characters themselves were amazing. I loved both characters so much. The girl was also very up-tight and loved if everything just went the way she planned it, she had a hard time with change. She reminded me a lot of myself which is probably why I loved the growth so much. She learned to accept that things didn't always go as planned and that change can be good sometimes. The guy learned to open up to other people. HE was always very caring and protecting, but never showed it. Towards the end he did learn how to show it and learned that pushing people away because you don't want to hurt them hurts them even more than anything else.
The idea of them trying to prove to each other that guys and girls can/can't be friends while proving that they are both right in so many ways is just really fun to read for mer. They learned in the end that you can be just friends as a guy and a girl, but that you have to be friends to be in a relationship. It's a message I really liked, even though it's not that deep, I do think more people need to hear it. If you wouldn't be friends with your significant other if you weren't in a relationship, you probably shouldn't be together.
The pacing of the book was also really nice to me. It was never boring or too slow, but it also wasn't love at first sight at all. I really enjoyed that the book really focused on making them understand each other and become friends before anything romantic happened. The fact that the pacing was perfect to understand the characters and get to know them as people and not just two people that fall in love and have no other personality was mind-blowing to me. Most YA romance books don't go in dept about the characters and make it purely about the romance, which I don't like at all. But this book did a great job of proving me that there are good YA romance books out there.
All in all I really loved the book even tho I don't read romance that often. I enjoyed everything about it and would definitely recommend it to people who just need a soft romance book to get their minds of things and get completely into the characters.