Author: Alison G. Bailey
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Publication Date: August 1, 2013
Kindle: 420 pages
Synopsis
I’ve been unsure about many things in my life except for one thing, that I have always loved him. Every single minute of every single day that I have been on this earth, my heart has belonged to him. It has never been a question, never a doubt. The love had taken on many different forms over the years, but it had always been a constant.
Everyone has their definition of love. There have been countless songs sung about it. A gazillion books, articles, and poems written about it. There are experts on love who will tell you how to get it, keep it, and get over it.
We’re led to believe love is complicated. It’s not the love that’s complicated. It’s all the crap that we attach to it and put in front of it that makes it difficult. If you’re smart, you’ll realize this before it’s too late and simplify.
Amanda Kelly spent her entire life trying to control every aspect of it, while striving for perfection. Her obsession with being perfect, along with her feelings of worthlessness, consumed her. The one thing she thought was perfect in her life was the bond she shared with her best friend, Noah.
Everything was going according to her life plan until she woke up one day and realized she had fallen in love with him. The one thing she couldn’t control was the affect he had on her. Noah had the power to give her one hundred lifetimes of happiness, which also gave him the power to completely devastate her. He was the one thing in her life that was perfect, but she couldn't allow herself to have him.
Her life begins to unravel. Events take over and force her to let go of her dreams and desires. She needs to realize that a person cannot control the events in their life, only their reaction to them...but will it be too late for her to save her relationship with her best friend?
Present Perfect is a story of how past events have present consequences and how perfect your present could be if you stopped fighting and just allowed it to happen.
Review:
I have no words.
Only feelings.
Emotions.
Erratic breathing... And the lack of.
The first half of the book is really cute. It reminded me of my childhood and my best friend, who just so happened to be a boy, so I related. I related so much, it was almost as if my thoughts were written into a book without my consent which is a GREAT thing! I was expecting the typical story about falling in love with your best friend/boy next-door, unrequited feelings, heartbreak yada yada yada. While I was right about the gist of the story, it turned out to be something much much more.
Amanda is living in the shadows of her perfect older sister and feels like she is never good enough at anything or for anyone. I honestly don’t see why her self-esteem is so bad, I think she put a lot more pressure on herself and made a bigger deal out of things then needed. Amanda and Noah grew up together, practically lived next door, had all their “firsts” together and it was a strictly platonic child love for one another until well it wasn't anymore.
One day you wake up and realize that boy next door isn't a little boy anymore. All of a sudden you notice his smell, you notice his mannerisms, his voice give you chill, his touch makes your spine tingle, and his smile give you butterflies, and his laugh ... oh, it’s the best sound you have ever heard in your life. All of a sudden she has boobs, and curves, and way her eyes light when you make her smile, the way her hair falls softly over her shoulders and she smells like a fresh spring morning. You grow up overnight and the feeling is so overwhelming terrifying you’d do almost anything to go back to yesterday, all out of fear. Fear of messing things up, fear of complications, fear of losing your best friend.
They both skid around their new found feelings until eventually Noah comes right out and admits he wants to be more with Amanda, he lays his feelings right out there to Amanda and doesn't hold back. Amanda feels the same way but doesn't admit to him, she thinks she isn't good enough for Noah (stupid unwarranted self-esteem issues) because she isn't perfect and does not want to risk losing their friendship because it is everything to her. As the years pass, Noah dates but never stops telling Amanda how he feels about her. He declares his love for Amanda despite being rejected over and over again.
The years pass by, one minute they are a freshman in high school and the next they are seniors, graduating and moving on to college. This is when the book really changes and becomes much more adult. Noah is going through something major, life changing event around this time and I really thought this would be the moment Amanda would declare her love for him but it doesn't happen and I was getting so frustrated with her. She let her low self-esteem and other people get in the way, after four years I couldn't justify her not telling Noah how she felt. He never stopped telling her how he felt even while dating other girls. He never stopped believing in her, in them.
Then in comes the second half of the book. Oh boy, I was in tears… like real tears falling down my face and not smalls tears, straight up boohoo ugly snot tears. It was heartbreaking, you really FEEL what it's like to be in her head, you feel angry with her you feel her helplessness, her sense of doom and her acceptance of it. Then Amanda meets a new friend Dalton who is simply a beautiful soul. He makes her realize you only live once. You go from thinking the world is full of an infinite amount of time to realizing nothing in this world is infinite. He gives her the courage to finally accept Noah and his unrelenting love for everything that is her. I felt like standing up fist pumping the air and screaming FINALLY!! God I feel like my eyes are going to fall out from all this crying I did! I found myself falling in love with both men for different reasons…. If it were possible to love two men at the same time, Noah & Dalton were it.
I cannot express how difficult it was for me to write this review, my emotions are still on high. I am so glad that my sister-in-law recommend this book to me, it's to put it simply a piece of art.
Buy The Book
No comments:
Post a Comment