Flat-Out Love Tour: Review & Giveaway

My first book blog tour! I'm so excited! Check out the below post for my review of Flat-Out Love by Jessica Park and a giveaway. Later today I'll feature a guest post by Jessica Park on the recent Wall Street Journal article about YA literature.

Title: Flat-Out Love

Author: Jessica Park

Publisher: Self-Published

Release Date: April 11, 2011

Date Read: June 27, 2011

Rating: 5/5 stars 

Goodreads

Summary

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. 

Review

Wow! I reviewed Flat-Out Love on a whim, to take my first dive into the world of self-published novels. I am blown away by Jessica Park's humorous writing and amazing plot. I would consider this one of the best novels of 2011. You should definitely check it out!

The characters. Don't even get me started on the characters. Flat-Out Love has some of the most hilarious, quirky, realistic, emotional, and relatable characters I've ever read about. Even the characters you don't understand or particularly like are so well written that you can't help but love hearing their stories. There's been a recent complaint about a lack of parents or family members in YA novels but instead this book is all about family interactions. My favourite aspect of the novel was the modern language and technology. Facebook status updates to start each chapter and constant music references made Julie, Matt and Finn even more real and humorous to read about. This would make an awesome movie!

Jessica Park stated that she had problems publishing Flat-Out Love mostly due to Julie's age. I would consider this a young adult novel because even though Julie's in university her story is more about her emotional relationships than her schooling. More teenagers would connect with her trials and tribulations than older adult readers. I hope publishers in the future would reconsider novels with older teenagers because they're missing out on a huge demographic of readers and some awesome novels. 

I absolutely loved this book. I cried, I laughed, I cried again. It taught me so much about love and life, less about university and more about finding my way. I thought I had a pretty solid prediction about the ending and where all the characters would end up but never in a million years would I have pictured such a perfect ending. I didn't want it to end and if I could I'd have Jessica Park write another novel with all the unseen conversations, all the "missing pieces" throughout the year.

Quote: "If you can't stop thinking about someone's update that's called status cling."

Recommended: The Year of Secret Assignments (Jaclyn Moriarty), Am I Right or Am I Right (Barry Jonsberg), Audrey, Wait! (Robin Benway)

Flat-Out Love is available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Paperback copies will be available soon.

GIVEAWAY

Throughout the tour we’re giving away three eBooks of ‘Flat-Out Love’ from Smashwords, so you can read the book in whichever format you’d like. Enter at each tour stop to increase your chances of winning.

Giveaway Rules

- Open internationally

- Comment on this post

- Fill out the form

- Bonus entries: promote the blog tour (tweet, sidebar link, blog entry, etc.)

- Giveaway ends midnight EST on July 12

Thank you  to Ashley at The Book Labyrinth for organizing this tour. Be sure to check out the other stops on the tour this week!