3 Everyone Loved it But Me...Again Stars *Spoiler-ish*This was me when I finished this book: Now, let me get one thing straight before I say anything else:L.J. Shen can fucking write. I totally jived with her composition style and I loved me some Shen metaphors and analogies. Because WITTY. Need some examples?I am here but to serve, people. "I settled in my seat on the wooden bench, my ass hitting the scarred pew with a bang. At 6'4", I looked like a giant trying to fit into a Barbie Dream House." "Troy Brennan was never on my radar, but he was on everyone else's. He was like the IKEA canvas pictures of London and New York in bachelor apartments, like fast food, like Starbucks, like a freaking Macbook Air for a preppy student--mainstream and well liked." Elllll. Ohhhhh. Ellllll. Now, with that said, I didn't hate this book. ***But I didn't love it either. And here's why:1) Inconsistent, Sometimes Gross, Push/Pull Between Troy & SparrowHoly shit, did these two have some hate/fuck going on, which was kinda fun for a while...Until it wasn't. Troy resented Sparrow for reasons that are revealed to us later in the book. As a result, he treats her like a Grade-A ASSHOLE for...most of the book. Now, I LOVE me the assholes. LOVE THEM. But in this case, Troy says and does mean things to her through the vast majority of this thing. And when he DOES say something nice to her...he admits to the reader during his POV segment that he made up what he said. AND only said it to shut her up. And....AND!He fucks his mistress.AFTER he and Sparrow are married.IN Troy and Sparrow's bedroom.BEFORE he and and Sparrow have had full-on sex, but AFTER they have made out a few times and had ORAL sex.Now, normally this would be a deal breaker and I would have dropped-kicked this things across the room. But, somehow Shen was able to write it so that I didn't HATE Troy for it, but still...*** Something that actually bothered me more than that (if you can believe it) was how inconsistent Sparrow was. She would say in her inner narrative that she cared for Troy despite his "deeds" (especially a big one that she finds out about at the end) but then immediately after that she would verbally tell Troy she didn't think she could overlook those same deeds......it just seemed like she was constantly contradicting herself...and not in a way that always made sense to me. Plus, when she got so mad about the fact that Troy buried her mom and didn't tell her? My attitude was kind of like...It's not like he KILLED her. And it's not like she hadn't already LEFT Sparrow and her Dad - by her own choice- WAY prior to that. So that was one of those flip-flop moments that irritated me. When IT was all going down at the end, Sparrow's inner dialogue was kind of accepting of it and "I can overlook it" and then suddenly she's all "What you did was horrible and I can't get over it."Pffffffffft. 2) Some Plot WTFsWTF #1At one point, Troy is "cleaning up" a location after an "incident" and he makes it clear that he "scrubbed the cabin clean, everything [dead guy] touched..." (meaning he cleaned away fingerprints)But later, about the SAME exact location, he says, "[Dead guy's] grave was found by the police, but so...[were bad guy's] sloppy fingerprints [which were] all over the cabin..."Okay...now, I'm not a CSI expert by any means...but let's just say that I know a little bit more than the average bear on this subject...And if Troy wiped down "everything dead guy [could have] touched," that pretty much encompasses the whole fucking interior. Because any "cleaner" worth his salt - and Troy is supposed to be the best of the best - is going to be fucking thorough and wipe down every surface. Now. Unless Troy has some wazoo x-ray fingerprint vision and thus the ability to separate dead guy's prints from bad guy's prints, EVERYTHING would have gotten wiped down...including BOTH sets of prints. So yeah, that kind of irritated me a tad. WTF #2Sparrow is supposedly a badass chef. She is constantly experimenting in the kitchen and, at one point, makes this uber ridic French meal that takes three hours to make and astounds them all. Now, we are supposed to believe that someone who likes to experiment like that and proves herself to have a drive to make awesome food is going to be happy stirring pancake batter as a career? For fucks sake, I am the WORST cook on the planet. My microwaving skills are surpassed only by my stellar ability to boil water. But even I can make a fucking pancake that tastes good. I'm sorry, that just seemed weird to me. 3) Sudden Changes in Romance and PlotBoth the romance and the plot had very abrupt "A-HA!" moments that seemed a little too...forced and unrealistic. Troy's realization that he has feelings for Sparrow comes very late and very sudden. And that, when paired with his behavior and inner thought process up until that point, just made it feel...flimsy. I didn't believe in their love. Second, the whole moment where Troy finds out the identity of the baddie he has been looking for throughout the book felt very Sunday Night Murder Mystery to me. Like seriously, it was almost like someone said:"It was Colonel Mustard. In the Billiards Room. With the candlestick...!"Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to tear this apart by any mean. Like I said, I really enjoyed Shen's writing style and the plot was super engaging up until about the 25% mark...after which all of the above things kind of started unraveling for me. But again, I think Shen is really talented and - being that this is one of her only two books at this point - I think she is only going to get better and better and I look forward to seeing what she has in store for us in the future. ***ARC provided by author in exchange for an honest review***