LAST YEAR'S MISTAKE by Gina Ciocca

Before:

Kelsey and David became best friends the summer before freshman year and were inseparable ever after. Until the night a misunderstanding turned Kelsey into the school joke, and everything around her crumbled—including her friendship with David. So when Kelsey's parents decided to move away, she couldn't wait to start over and leave the past behind. Except, David wasn't ready to let her go...

After:

Now it's senior year and Kelsey has a new group of friends, genuine popularity, and a hot boyfriend. Her life is perfect. That is, until David's family moves to town and he shakes up everything. Soon old feelings bubble to the surface and threaten to destroy Kelsey's second chance at happiness. The more time she spends with David, the more she realizes she never truly let him go. And maybe she never wants to.

First thing you need to know about this book - it’s one of those books that makes you work for what you want. I’m not kidding. Have you ever read one of those books where you go through a couple of hundred pages just so that you can get an outcome? This is one of those books.

Kelsey and David were well written characters. They were real in the sense that they had strengths, weaknesses, and good background stories. I felt bad for David immediately, at least until he came in and started to act like a jerk (which of course only encouraged Kelsey to act like a jerk as well.)

To say the least, it was exhausting reading their many jabs back at each other. One second they’re best friends and hugging it out, and then they’re really mad at each other again and trying to be the one who hurts the other the most. From the very beginning of the book, it mentioned that something had happened in their past that was making their relationship this complicated. But after getting to that point, it wasn’t as painful of a memory as I was expecting. I thought it was going to be a truly terrible thing that had happened, but mostly it just made me roll my eyes. It was simple teenage drama, basically, and my biggest problem with this book. But I suppose I can’t hate too hard - I know, as a teenage girl myself, that we can be pretty ridiculous.

My second biggest problem was how often they threatened to shove each other out of their lives, when supposedly they “loved” each other. If you love somebody, wouldn’t you want them in your life no matter what? Even if you weren’t with them? Maybe wait for each other? But it could just be a character defining moment, and it wasn’t too far fetched. If somebody had hurt me a lot I would most likely try to distance myself as well.

Overall, I loved the emotion and I liked the ending. The pain was good as well. Call me masochistic, but I like when the feels are physically painful while I am reading. Crazy, I know, but that’s how it is.

Here’s my first complicated rating! It was better than 3.5 stars but maybe not as good as 4 stars, so somewhere around 3.8-3.9 stars.

***GREAT BIG THANK YOU TO SIMON PULSE FOR AN ARC OF THIS BOOK***