Review: City Love by Susane Colasanti

City Love by Susane Colasanti
Release Date: April 21, 2015
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Review Copy from Edelweiss

Sadie, Darcy, and Rosanna are living together in New York City the summer before their freshman year of college begins. With no parents, no rules, and an entire city to explore, these three girls are on the verge of the best summer of their lives.

Sadie is a native New Yorker. She is hopeful, romantic, and an eternal optimist who is ready to find her soul mate. Then she meets her dream boy: cute, funny, and quirky in all the right ways. The chemistry between them is unreal. Could he be the one?

Darcy is a free spirit from SoCal with rebellious tendencies and unlimited financial resources. Moving to New York City is just another adventure for her. Darcy wants this summer to be all about boy adventures—nothing serious. But how much fun is too much?

Rosanna leaves Chicago for NYC so she can put her past behind her and reinvent herself. The only thing standing in her way is the grand total of seventy-three cents she has saved. Then she meets a guy who wants to show her the glamorous side of New York—a side that she would never get to experience on her own. If Rosanna doesn't resist, she may find herself in city love.

Told from alternating points of view, City Love captures the moments in each girl's life when everything is thrilling, amazing, and terrifying all at once . . . in a way it will never be again.

My thoughts:

Imagine an episode of Gossip Girl written by a fourteen year old boy crazy girl... if that sounds appealing to you, then you should probably check out this book.

I am not a fan of writing negative reviews. I know how much work goes into a book and what a difficult process it must be for an author to turn an idea into a full novel. But it is not very often that I feel this strongly about a book, at least not in a negative way. Because seriously, City Love was just... I don't know whether I will be able to express with words how much I disliked this book.

We are introduced to Darcy, Sadie and Rosanna. Darcy is a California girl who has spent the previous year traveling around Europe. Sadie is a native New Yorker with a dream of making the world a better place. Rosanna is from Chicago and though living in New York is her dream, she is constantly struggling financially. The paths of these three girls intersect when they move into a shared housing offered by the university they have all been accepted for the summer season. They cannot believe that they are in one of the coolest cities in the world and able to do whatever they want without constant parental supervision.

A novel about three very different girls living in New York City with alternating point of views. Sounds good right? Well, that was I thought when I heard about this one. Unfortunately, very quickly I was proved wrong. All the way from the beginning, the narration is just all over the place – at one point these girls have all these long thoughts about how they want to make the world a better place and the next moment they are acting in a complete opposite way. It is ridiculous how boy crazy these girls are and how pretty much every single guy they meet is cute and one they can feel a connection with. Yeah, so realistic. Though there clearly has been an attempt to distinguish these girls from each other, I continually felt like they are just a one person with very incoherent thoughts.

This book is so heavy with instalove it is kind of ridiculous. Seriously, these characters just glance at a guy and think that they have met their soul mates. The ridiculous thing is that the events of this book take place over two weeks. So pretty much after two meetings with these guys, these girls are declaring love for eternity. Rather than actually making it possible for the reader to understand what's so awesome about these guys, Colasanti's love interests are these one dimensional boys that fit to some sort of stereotype – the mysterious and artistic boy, the rich but gentle boy and the hipster, free spirited guy. I seriously felt nothing for these guys. NOTHING.

You know how some authors sometimes have a tendency to repeat certain things over and over again (for example the ridiculous “he touched me... there” that is repeated like fifty million times in Fifty Shades of Grey). Well, Colasanti does that with terms like “boy confidence” and “laser focus”. I am still not sure what “boy confidence” exactly means, but I guess it has something to do with the way these girls act around boys. And this “laser focus” thing is something Donovan, Rosanne's love interest, apparently does when he looks at her. Seriously – would you want someone to look at you with a “laser focus”. I would not.

One of the things that really irked me about this novel is how these girls seem to define themselves through these guys. For example Rosanne thinks that the first time she has felt special is when Donovan tells her that he thinks she is special. It seems like these girls, despite all of these awesome opportunities they have in the city, base their lives fully around these guys they meet. Especially Darcy annoyed me – her inner thoughts make her seem confident and like someone who does not define herself through relationships, but the way she acts just points to the opposite. It feels like Colasanti has desperately tried to dig into this whole “girl power” thing but unfortunately that attempt has bombed. BIG TIME.

Rather than focusing on the potentially interesting budding friendship between these three girls, Colasanti has written a novel so full of unnecessary, cringe worthy cliches. So much drama is packed to the last 10 % of the book in preparation for the sequel, which I am definitely not going to pick up. My expectations weren't super high or anything when it comes to this book, but I did not expect something quite as bad as this. There was nothing in this book that would make it possible for me to recommend it for anyone. Reading this one was a colossal waste of time.

1 Snowflake