Review: Flat Out Love – 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.
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.

Series:
Release Date:  April 11, 2011
Publisher:  Jessica Park
Source:  Kindle Lending Library
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Reviewer’s Thoughts:

I’m so glad that I followed the leader on this one and picked it up. It’s definitely not one of your typical YA romance books. It’s filled with quirky characters and dialogue that at times has your laughing or breaks your heart.

Julie, a college freshman, finds herself without an apartment a week before school starts. Enter the Watkins family. Julie’s mom, Kate, went to college with Erin Watkins. So as any good mother would, she called up her long lost college roommate and found a place for her daughter to stay. On the surface, the family seems to be like an other typical family with quirks. But as Julie’s life intertwines with theirs we start to discover something amiss with the Watkins. The parents who are never home, the eldest son, Finn, is globe-trotting, and the youngest son, Matt, is left to care for his baby sister, Celeste. Julie become Celeste’s caregiver, in hopes of helping the little girl fit in, but she discovers it may not be just Celeste that needs help.

I won’t lie and say I didn’t figure out the plot “shocker”, but the characters were so engaging I found myself unable to put the book down because I needed to know what happened with Julie, Matt, Finn and Celeste. I was lost in the friendship that built between Matt and Julie. I was desperate to discover if Julie could help Celeste be less socially awkward. And I needed to know if Finn was ever going to visit his home again.

The last 50 or so pages will absolutely rip your heart out, but they’ll also produce a watery smile when we finally get to see a “whole” Watkins family.

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