FlumeAward – Flat-Out Love Flat Out Love by Jessica Park
I liked this one but I’m a little on the fence about including it in the final list. Jessica Park lives in New Hampshire so that is neat. Julie is from Ohio and about to start her freshman year at Whitney College in Boston, but when she arrives she finds that the apartment she was counting on isn’t available. Her mother’s college roommate is a Harvard professor and offers her son’s room to Julie since he is traveling the world. Julie accepts and ends up thinking of the quirky Watkins clan as her own family, even though they each have their issues and the family doesn’t really function as a whole. The parents are not around very much; the middle son, Matt, is a math genius studying at MIT; and the youngest, Celeste, has some social and emotional issues. There are some interesting issues brought up, and most of the dialogue is funny and clever (although at times it feels like it is trying to be a bit too clever), but there are some editing issues that annoyed me–some strange hyphenation, typos, and a few cases of font issues (bolding/italicizing that continued even though the part that was bolded/italicized was over), etc. It was self-published but I’m pretty sure she had an editor. That said, those issues don’t detract from the story completely, and other people might not notice them as much as I did. It had a lot of favorable reviews by teens on the Amazon page, and at least one mentioned that the eBook had no typo/editing issues. According to Amazon, this was a NY Times Bestseller…Caitlin, Bedford Public Library