Synopsis
Flat-Out Love is a warm and witty novel of family love and dysfunction, deep heartache and raw vulnerability, with a bit of mystery and one whopping, knock-you-to-your-knees romance.
Something is seriously off in the Watkins home. And Julie Seagle, college freshman, small-town Ohio transplant, and the newest resident of this Boston house, is determined to get to the bottom of it.
When Julie’s off-campus housing falls through, her mother’s old college roommate, Erin Watkins, invites her to move in. The parents, Erin and Roger, are welcoming, but emotionally distant and academically driven to eccentric extremes. The middle child, Matt, is an MIT tech geek with a sweet side … and the social skills of a spool of USB cable. The youngest, Celeste, is a frighteningly bright but freakishly fastidious 13-year-old who hauls around a life-sized cardboard cutout of her oldest brother almost everywhere she goes.
And there’s that oldest brother, Finn: funny, gorgeous, smart, sensitive, almost emotionally available. Geographically? Definitely unavailable. That’s because Finn is traveling the world and surfacing only for random Facebook chats, e-mails, and status updates. Before long, through late-night exchanges of disembodied text, he begins to stir something tender and silly and maybe even a little bit sexy in Julie’s suddenly lonesome soul.
To Julie, the emotionally scrambled members of the Watkins family add up to something that … well … doesn’t quite add up. Not until she forces a buried secret to the surface, eliciting a dramatic confrontation that threatens to tear the fragile Watkins family apart, does she get her answer.
Flat-Out Love comes complete with emails, Facebook status updates, and instant messages.
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My Review
I absolutely loved this book and read it within a couple of hours. I just couldn’t put it down.
The synopsis kind of highlights what is expected in the book, so there isn’t really a lot to review it about.
This book made me laugh so much at times, especially between Matt and Julie. It made me smile at the bond Celeste and Julie made and I had a few tears- happy and sad- towards the end where everything unravels and you find out what has happened. I kind of understood why they kept it from Julie, but she was pushed right into the middle of it, without the parents knowing what was happening, but on the other hand, they should of told her without hiding it from her.
It’s hard to write a review without actually spoiling the book for others as a couple of chapters from the end you find out what happened to the family (which I had an inkling about and then it confirmed it) but I have just got to say I loved Julie and the Watkins family. What wasn’t there to love?!
Z. Elizabeth 