Review: The Lonesome Young by Lucy Connors

The Lonesome Young by Lucy connors
Published: April 8th, 2014 (Razorbill)
Pages: 336
Source: for review
Series: Untitled Series, #1
Buy the book: Bookdepository
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆


WHAT HAPPENS when the teenage heirs of two bitterly FEUDING FAMILIES can’t stay away from each other?

The Rhodales and the Whitfields have been sworn enemies for close on a hundred years, with a whole slew of adulterous affairs, financial backstabbing, and blackmailing that’s escalated the rivalry to its current state of tense ceasefire.

IT’S TIME TO LIGHT THE FUSE . . .

And now a meth lab explosion in rural Whitfield County is set to reignite the feud more viciously than ever before. Especially when the toxic fire that results throws together two unlikely spectators—proper good girl Victoria Whitfield, exiled from boarding school after her father’s real estate business melts down in disgrace, and town motorcycle rebel Mickey Rhodale, too late as always to thwart his older brothers’ dangerous drug deals.

Victoria and Mickey are about to find out the most passionate romances are the forbidden ones.

. . . ON A POWDER KEG FULL OF PENT-UP DESIRE, risk-taking daredevilry, and the desperate actions that erupt when a generation of teens inherits nothing but hate.

Warning: this book is so frustrating, I had to vent. This review is filled with spoilers. If you don't want to be spoiled, click away now. 

I had so many problems with this book, it's hard not to go off on a rampage. Whenever I finish a book, I take notes of the story and what I thought of it. The list of notes I have for this book is purely negative. I've never had a book that resulted in me being unable to think of positive things whatsoever. But somehow, The Lonesome Young was able to get under my skin. Here's why.

First of all, let's look at that synopsis. Isn't that the most terrible synopsis you have ever read in the history of the synopsis? Truth be told, it's a perfect reflection of the story inside the book.

Feuding families, enemies for almost a century. Thing is, there isn't much of a feud. At all. The Whitfields and Rhodales mostly ignore eachother, so they only know who belongs to the family. They do nothing but hiss at eachother when they can see eachother. Think of it as two cats on opposite sides of a window. All hissing but no action. The only interaction between these families is a bit of bickering when a methlab is blown up, and even that doesn't appear to be really serious. Honestly, I fail to see this family feud.

Enter the next cliché: the perfect blonde good girl of one family takes a look at the dark dangerous bad boy of the second family, and they feel an instant connection (I realise this is several clichés forged into one sentence). He was wearing a helmet, for fuck's sake, and you only saw him in passing. How the hell can you feel a connection? You can barely see his eyes! You saw someone on a motorcycle, you couldn't possibly have seen more than a tiny bit of his face and yet you already feel drawn to him? What is this nonsense?! To make matters worse, the bad boy immediately turns into an overprotective softy after seeing the blonde damsel in distress while he drove past. He feels a need to protect her, even though he has no idea who she is and has never ever spoken to her. Not. A. Single. Word. What's with this territorial urge?

When the characters finally start to interact after this life-changing event of looking eachother in the eye, they talk as if they are at least 30 instead of the 17ish they're supposed to be. I'm guessing the author usually writes adult romance, because there's no way other way she thinks this is how a teenager behaves. It's not realistic and it just adds to the ridiculousness of this story. To make matters worse, every single event in the book is triggered by a bad decision one of the protagonists makes. Most of those decisions are things to 'protect' the other from the so-called family feud, but only result in making matters worse. Mind you, because of these stupid things these people do, there actually seems to be a family feud starting. Let me once again point out that letting your characters make the most ridiculous choices is not the way to make your plot work. If your plot doesn't work, change it, instead of twisting it into something that is utterly unbelievable.

Basically, this book is about a romance between two people who shouldn't be together because these families don't want them to be. This actually makes the families want to fight, resulting into an incident that happens at about 75% of the book. This is the first thing that actually happens to illustrate this 'feud'. At that point, I had already given up half a dozen times. I still don't know why I managed to read on, because the story was dragging and only had more unbelievable things in store. The characters kept repeating how they had an instant connection, how they should be together, but there was zero chemistry. If negative chemistry was a thing, they would have it. Ugh.

Leaves me to add that if you liked Beautiful Disaster, you'd probably like this one as well. There were so many similarities, it wouldn't have surprised me if this was written by the same author. The only difference was that I felt Jamie McGuire can actually write, but unfortunately I cannot say the same about this author. The story didn't make sense, it didn't read easily, the plot didn't work, the characters had no chemistry and the dialogue was awful. I can postively say that I have no good things to say about this book. I'd avoid it like the plague, if I were you. Just my 2 cents.