Review + Favorite Quotes: Love Me Never - Sara Wolf

Hi!
Today I'm doing a review of Love Me Never, which is a book I've been meaning to read and finally read this month! Keep your eyes open for the review of the second book, Forget Me Always!

Title: Love Me Never (Lovely Vicious #1)
Author: Sara Wolf 
Published by: Entangled Teen
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9781633752290

Synopsis:
Don’t love your enemy. Declare war on him.
Seventeen-year-old Isis Blake hasn’t fallen in love in three years, nine weeks, and five days, and after what happened last time, she intends to keep it that way. Since then she’s lost eighty-five pounds, gotten four streaks of purple in her hair, and moved to Buttcrack-of-Nowhere, Ohio, to help her mom escape a bad relationship.
All the girls in her new school want one thing—Jack Hunter, the Ice Prince of East Summit High. Hot as an Armani ad, smart enough to get into Yale, and colder than the Arctic, Jack Hunter's never gone out with anyone. Sure, people have seen him downtown with beautiful women, but he's never given high school girls the time of day. Until Isis punches him in the face.
Jack’s met his match. Suddenly everything is a game.
The goal: Make the other beg for mercy.
The game board: East Summit High.
The reward: Something neither of them expected.


Love Me Never is one of those books that you have to read once in a while. Super quick, with a female main character that has the wittiest comebacks you'll ever see and an icy mysterious boy that doesn't have a happy life. That is - in a way - how this book works, and some people can say that is predictable, since there are a lot of clichés, but I truly enjoyed it.

One important thing that hooked me from the very beginning was the diversity of the main character, Isis. She was overweight and bullied, mainly by her crush, and after a traumatic event she decided to change her body and her future. So she lost the weight and she moved town. However, something I don't read a lot in YA books is the aftermath of this big changes, and in Love Me Never the author doesn't hid them.
Isis has stretch marks and zits and she's traumatized by what happened to her, and I love that all of this is important in the book. So many books create this perfect girl, someone who doesn't have zits, stretch marks, celulite, things that everyone has in some point in life, and it's a bit hurtful that authors forget those particulars of human beings. But Love Me Never doesn't do that. Isis and all of the other characters aren't perfect, just like us.

“Did you have fun? How many boys did you make out with?"
"Seventy. At least."
"How many shots did you take?"
"Fourteen. I let go of the wheel halfway home and Jesus drove me the rest of the way.”


Even though the female character proved to be somewhere similar to me, there were things about her personality that I didn't enjoyed, particularly her mood swings. She would decide something in one day, and in the other she would have a completely different opinion or she would be super confident about her looks, however if someone complemented her appearance, she would immediately say she was ugly.
Okay, we're all like that sometimes but she was a bit drastic for my liking. Isis also did some things that I didn't agreed on (like paying Jack to go on a date with her friend), which made her seem a bit childish sometimes.

The male character though I really liked. Jack was such an interesting and mature character that knew what was important to him and what he had to do to achieve something. He could also be cruel while being honest, but I liked him anyway. And I particularly loved his scenes with Isis, they were hilarious together and I just wanted more of them. 

There was this big mystery around Jack and some girl named Sophia, so that also kept me hooked on the pages of this book!

Now, let's talk about the ending. And I want to start by saying that once I finished this book, I immediately started the next one. That's how the ending of Love Me Never left me.
However, I didn't enjoyed it at all, mostly because the amnesia plot has been done so many times and I don't think it worked well into this book and it's plot. There were a lot of developments, mainly with Isis and Jack, and Isis' amnesia just ruined everything that had happened in the previous 300 pages. 
Obviously I had to immediately start Forget Me Always, but I don't think the ending that Sara Wolf chose was the most appropriate for the plot and the characters. 

“I would love to slap you right now, but I’m currently wielding a nine pound ball and I’m afraid that would be called murder.”


Overall, I really liked the first book in the Lovely Vicious series written by Sara Wolf. Love Me Never is well written and it keeps you hooked until the very end. The characters are very funny and you can relate to them and their problems. 
The only two things that could have been better for me, and could have made this a five-stars book were: 
  1. Isis' personality changes: she would be so confident in one moment, and super down in the other, it was like a human rollercoaster;
  2. The ending: the amnesia trick was too-easy and not that realistic.

What about you? Have you read Love Me Never? If so, share your thoughts! If not, do you plan to pick it up? 

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