Last Chance Books – 4 Star Book Review

Don’t you just love the smell of old books in the morning?

Thank you to HarperCollins Canada for the eARC copy! I am so grateful to be able to request galleys and this was one of the titles on the HCC Frenzy preview list for the summer catalogue that really caught my attention. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

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About the Book

Last Chance Books
by Kelsey Rodkey

Published 18 May 2021
HarperTeen

Genre: YA Contemporary
Page Count: 368
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Don’t you just love the smell of old books in the morning?

Madeline Moore does. Books & Moore, the musty bookstore her family has owned for generations, is where she feels most herself. Nothing is going to stop her from coming back after college to take over the store from her beloved aunt.

Nothing, that is—until a chain bookstore called Prologue opens across the street and threatens to shut them down.

Madeline sets out to demolish the competition, but Jasper, the guy who works over at Prologue, seems intent on ruining her life. Not only is he taking her customers, he has the unbelievable audacity to be… extremely cute.

But that doesn’t matter. Jasper is the enemy and he will be destroyed. After all—all’s fair in love and (book) wars.

Amazon US | Amazon CA | Amazon UK

My Review

My Rating: 4 Stars
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Madeline dreams of graduating college with a degree that doesn’t matter at all, because she already knows what she’s going to do with the rest of her life. She’ll take over the family book store! But when her aunt reveals that the book store is closing due to financial strain and her rivalry with the owner’s son from the book store across the street goes from enemies to lovers to “it’s complicated,” the future gets a whole lot cloudier. Oh, and did we mention that her absentee mother is in town?

This book is getting pretty mixed responses, no doubt due to the fact that the plot is partly predictable and partly not predictable enough. I’ll admit the plot twists I didn’t see coming weren’t always as satisfying as I wanted them to be, or took the plot in a direction I wasn’t hoping for. Did that spoil the experience? No! Not at all.

This is a cute coming-of-age story with a side of tropey teenage romance filtered through the lens of a book lover who wants nothing more than to sell books forever, and I think a lot of us reviewers can relate. Madeline is a very empathetic, relatable character, and her complicated family is both charming and I’d even say important in the YA space. This is a broken and blended family that’s going to represent a lot of readers who might not necessarily see their situation in mainstream fiction very often.

So what’s stopping me from calling this book a full 5 out of 5 stars? Dahlia . This deadbeat mom who decided to drop back in on her teenage kids over the summer is significantly less mature than her teenage offspring and lacks the people skills her social clime through the world of show biz would require. My hatred of this character goes beyond sympathetic hatred for Madeline’s sake and settles into the “I genuinely hate this character all on her own” territory, but I honestly don’t think we’re supposed to. I think we’re supposed to pity her and grow to like her.

Overall this is a cute book and I think bookworms who enjoy contemporary romance of the YA variety will enjoy it.

Looking for something a little different? My favourite new release of June was The Darkness Outside Us by Elliot Schrefner, a YA Science Fiction with M/M romantic elements.

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