I feel sort of bad for DNFing this one as this was a book I picked for a giveaway win. It sounds very much like my sort of book - average girl goes to super fancy boarding school and becomes friends with the most unattainable girl on campus - the one everyone wants to be friends with but it's this girl from a regular background that gets her attention. Things start to go great but then go very wrong.

Trigger Warnings for suicide and drug use.

I made it 265 pages and frankly just don't care anymore. I don't quite get what the point of this book is. I don't like the characters enough to care to want to finish to find out.

The style of the writing is bizarre. It's like the main character is chatting to a friend as she's telling the story, it's almost like - so I did this and that happens and you know that sort thing that you never think would happen to you? That totally happens to me and I know what you're thinking and don't think like that! Paraphrasing obviously. But it's sort of like that and disjointed and weird.

The main character is supposed to be very intelligent and sometimes it clearly shows and she can be very deep and insightful in surprising way. Other times the rambles are pointless. She starts off by describing her only friends with their disabilities and character flaws, she talks endlessly about wanting to kill herself, almost like it's just something to do. Which is annoying because of the almost blase way she talks something so serious. Then the plot sort of trails off and nothing really happens with it. It's never addressed. Only when she needs to use those emotions to manipulate something to her own advantage to change dorms. She pretends she's so stressed she'll want to kill herself and then remembers like - oh yeah, I sort of really wanted to do that so play off those emotions. Kind of disgusting. She uses the word "spastic" a lot when describing how her best friend is acting strange. And that pisses me off. No need to use that word.

The main character is horrible and annoying, and almost nothing has happened plotwise. Other than she's made friends with a very rich but flakey girl and now both girls are doing drugs - popping pills. One can get away with it because she's rich and everyone wants her to like them, but the other one is a scholarship student and can't afford to be strung out on drugs and not keep her grades up. It's blah and boring as hell. One is having an affair with a teacher and the other thinks it's a spectacularly bad idea. There are two potential boys the main character could be interested in.

Yawn.

I just have no desire to read anymore of this.

I won a copy through a BookLIkes.com giveaway. Even when i lost my copy after the kindle app on my iPhone crashed and I lost the document I contact ed the author and she provided me with another copy, so thank you for that :)

This turned out to be quite different from what I expected, and I'm please to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I did get a bit confused when starting the book, with the hero and heroine having the name nickname of Cal. Her name Caledonia and his name Calvin. But the flow of the story made it easy to get around that. It wasn't something that cropped up all the time.

The story was quite original, which I liked to see. Caledonia has an unusual ability and her parents keep her away from the public and raise her out of the way in the woods. Tragedy strikes and she has to go live with an aunt she's never met and deal with high school for the first time. Very difficult with her ability. Caledonia was a wonderful character. She was quite naive about the way the world worked having not grown up in it, but she learned to cope quite well and turned out to be amazingly strong willed. 

The bad boy love invest Calvin was a typical biker partying hooking up with random girls type. I didn't like him much when the book started, he notices Caleodonia right away but she quickly picks up on the bad boy biker partied thing and doesn't want anything to do with him. No insta love, it takes time for the to grow comfortable with each other. Calvin's biker brother and the girls who hang around turn out to be not so bad and actually pretty decent people when Caledonia does come into the picture.

And when the romance finally gets there...the feels in this book are so wonderful, it packs quite an emotional punch throughout. Both characters grow tremendously as people. Cali's abilities come into play an important part of the story and there are bad guys who come into play. Left open need for the next book, I would definitely be interested in where to see the story goes next.