Book Review: Lola and the Boy Next Door

                                          Lola and the Boy Next Door Review

Lola is a seventeen year old with a special sense of style in that she wears a different costume every day and she designs and makes her own clothes. She starts off the story just wanting her dads to accept her twenty-two year old boyfriend but her life becomes much more complicated when Calliope and Cricket Bell move back in next door after being gone for two years. Calliope is a girl that Lola was friends with when she was little but soon decided that she was too good for and was much too busy practice and competing in figure skating championships to be friends with her. Cricket on the other hand was the first boy Lola loved and while they never got the chance to date there's still a lot of things that were left unresolved since they last seen each other.

At first Lola thinks that she hates Cricket now but as soon as she sees him again for the first time the two of them can't help but fall into a friendly routine with each other that's a bit awkward do to the distance and the longing that has separated them these last two years. Cricket seems to be the same yet different version of the boy she fell for an aspiring inventor who now doubts himself but encourages everyone else's talents, whose kind and filled with endless energy that makes his awkward charm almost impossible to resist. Lola and Cricket end up reconnecting and clearly up their past issues and growing closer and closer as the book goes on.

But Cricket is far from Lola's only problem when her birth mother who is a former alcoholic comes to live with her and her dads after being evicted from her apartment throws her whole life for a loop due to the complicated and painful relationship the two of them share with each other. Then to make matters worse Lola's starting to see that her boyfriend and her don't seem to fit together as well as she thought they did.

I overall really loved this book I thought that this book was so much better than Anna and the French Kiss which is a book that at first I felt just kind of let down by but then over time I've come to really really dislike it this was in large part because St. Clair just didn't work for me as a romantic lead so I was very happy and somewhat surprised to find that I loved this book and it's characters. I thought that both Lola and Cricket and all of the other characters that filled this story were all very engaging and were able to suck me into their world. I found Lola to be wonderfully eccentric but I also felt that she felt very real in a strange way as well and I found Cricket to be a complete sweetheart who's appearances I always looked forward to. I also found that I enjoyed St. Clair a lot more as a character when he wasn't seen through Anna's overly romanticized point of view which is something that I had expected to be true for awhile but it still shocked me how much point of view can change how I feel about a character. I felt that this book was as well written as Anna and the French Kiss but this time I found the characters and it's plot much more enjoyable. Please tell me your thoughts on this book.