Book Talk Review; Flat-Out-Love

 Today's Book Talk is Flat-Out-Love by Jessica Park

 

 Flat-Out Love is a warm and witty novel of family love and dysfunction, deep heartache and raw vulnerability, with a bit of mystery and one whopping, knock-you-to-your-knees romance.

 It's not what you know--or when you see--that matters. It's about a journey.

 Something is seriously off in the Watkins home. And Julie Seagle, college freshman, small-town Ohio transplant, and the newest resident of this Boston house, is determined to get to the bottom of it. When Julie's off-campus housing falls through, her mother's old college roommate, Erin Watkins, invites her to move in. The parents, Erin and Roger, are welcoming, but emotionally distant and academically driven to eccentric extremes. The middle child, Matt, is an MIT tech geek with a sweet side ... and the social skills of a spool of USB cable. The youngest, Celeste, is a frighteningly bright but freakishly fastidious 13-year-old who hauls around a life-sized cardboard cutout of her oldest brother almost everywhere she goes.

 And there's that oldest brother, Finn: funny, gorgeous, smart, sensitive, almost emotionally available. Geographically? Definitely unavailable. That's because Finn is traveling the world and surfacing only for random Facebook chats, e-mails, and status updates. Before long, through late-night exchanges of disembodied text, he begins to stir something tender and silly and maybe even a little bit sexy in Julie's suddenly lonesome soul.

 To Julie, the emotionally scrambled members of the Watkins family add up to something that ... well ... doesn't quite add up. Not until she forces a buried secret to the surface, eliciting a dramatic confrontation that threatens to tear the fragile Watkins family apart, does she get her answer.

 Flat-Out Love comes complete with emails, Facebook status updates, and instant messages.

  This book is a fun and witty and full of memorable sweet and loving moments.

 Julie is a college freshman, on her first day in Boston she runs into a housing problem. Having no choice but to call her mom and figure out a new plan her mom calls an old college friend of hers Erin Watkins to help out. 

 Erin agrees to take Julie in. Julie promises to be in and out. She wasn't supposed to be important to the Watkins family. 

 And then she is. Julie is thrust into the life of the Watkins and even though everything about them is strange and there is something quite odd about them, she can't help but love them. 

 When Julie begins to message the absent oldest brother Finn her curiosity sky-rockets. 

 Suddenly Julie finds herself falling for someone she's never met. 

 But then there's also Matt, the awkward boy who Julie is also fascinated with.

 But then what happens when the truth about everything comes out? 

 What happens when Julie learns the family secrets that change everything for everyone. 

 I loved this book. The dialogue between Matt and Julie is hilarious. I love their back and forth banter. Matt might be tall and pale and wears shirts that are the ultimate degree of geek-ness. But he is also kind and caring and while his speech might be stiff and he might be so smart that he's also dumb. I still fell in love with him. 

 I fell in love with the conversations that Julie had with both Finn and Matt. 

 Celeste is a whole other thing within herself. She is too smart for her own good. She has the same clipped stiff speech that Matt has. And she carries around Flat-Finn, the cardboard cut-out of her oldest brother Finn. 

 I loved this book and can't wait to get started in on Flat-Out-Celeste the second book in the series and the story of Celeste and Justin. 

 This was a fun witty book about love and family and the dysfunctionalness of life. The love was sweet and the story moved along perfectly. 

 I had a feeling about what was going to happen and I couldn't help but cry. The part that made me cry was hard to read because I was so invested in the characters that I couldn't help but get caught up in the story and I wanted everything to be perfect and I wanted Julie and the Watkins to live in their content little bubble even if it was wrong and unreal. 

Jessica is an amazing author and I loved this book so much. 

 *Quote- "Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise." -Victor Hugo

               "But that's what love does to you. Gut-wrenching, overpowering, crushing, fulfilling, complex, bring-you-to-your-knees love." -Julie

 For Jessica's Author Talk: http://realtalkbooktalk.blogspot.com/2014/07/book-talk-jessica-park.html

 Make sure you Tune in Thursday for My Book Talk on Left Drowning

-Abri