This Girl (Slammed, # 3)
By: Colleen Hoover
Expected Publication: April 30th 2013 by Atria Books
256 pages
Genre: YA, Contemporary
Source: Publisher via NetGalley (many thanks!!!)
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Goodreads description--There are two sides to every love story. Now hear Will’s.Colleen Hoover’s New York Times bestselling Slammed series has brought countless readers to their knees with a whirlwind of love, passion, and heartache. Layken and Will’s love has managed to withstand the toughest of circumstances and the young lovers, now married, are beginning to feel safe and secure in their union. As much as Layken relishes their new life together, she finds herself wanting to know everything there is to know about her husband, even though Will makes it clear he prefers to keep the painful memories of the past where they belong. Still, he can’t resist his wife’s pleas and so he begins to untangle his side of the story, revealing for the first time his most intimate feelings and thoughts, retelling both the good and bad moments, and sharing a few shocking confessions of his own from the time when they first met.
In This Girl, Will tells the story of their complicated relationship from his point of view. Their future rests on how well they deal with the past in this final installment of the beloved Slammed series.
You guys...I LOVED Slammed and gave it my 5 Star rating. I also loved Point of Retreat and gave it 4.9 Stars. While I've said that I don't want to read the re-telling of every book originally told from a female perspective now told from the male POV in the past, I keep finding myself drawn to these very books. I can't say "no."
I fell in love with these characters--all of them--when I read Slammed. Will is a super hot leading man, IMO. He's so smart. He's been through so much emotionally with losing both of his parents and raising his younger brother. He's only twenty-one. He's going to school and working full-time. He's the epitome of someone who's taken lemons and is trying to turn them into lemonade. He's been angry at his parents for not preparing for the event that something might happen to one or both of them. He's been angry at life for dealing him such a crappy hand and taking away so many decisions for him. But he's made the best of it. He's dealing. AND on top of that...he's a poet and a performer. HOT!!!!!!!!!
I love the other characters too, but this book was all about Will, and I loved it! Pretty much the entire time I was reading it, I had this huge smirk on my face. I was trying to suppress a smile because I felt like a crazy person smiling like an idiot while reading this book. I also teared up, despite knowing exactly what happens in the majority of the book. I mean it is a re-telling of Slammed. I tell you, I felt inspired while reading this book. Colleen Hoover is really exceptional at evoking emotion and pulling me into her stories. I've loved everything she's written.
The only thing that I disliked about This Girl was the while in the honeymoon scenes Will talks to Lake as he's talking to her, using the pronoun "you" and speaks to her of events passed in the past tense. However, when we switch to the re-telling of the events of Slammed Will swaps to using the pronoun "she" in reference to Lake so that it feels like he's speaking to the reader rather than speaking to Lake in the present moment. And he also uses present tense verbs as if the events are taking place in the present moment rather than him recounting the events to Lake. I find Colleen Hoover's choice to narrate in this way a bit odd. And while it didn't stop me from enjoying the book, with every switch I found myself wondering why she made this decision. It wasn't a huge issue, and maybe she did that in order to pull the reader in more. I'm not sure.
Despite being a re-telling, This Girl still evoked such strong emotion in me that I can only give it a 5 Star rating the same as Slammed. Reading Will's POV enriches the story and makes me love this cast of characters even more. Have you read This Girl? What did you think? Let me know!
