If I Fix You by Abigail Johnson | Book Review

BLURB: When sixteen-year-old Jill Whitaker’s mom walks out—with a sticky note as a goodbye—only Jill knows the real reason she’s gone. But how can she tell her father? Jill can hardly believe the truth herself.

Suddenly, the girl who likes to fix things—cars, relationships, romances, people—is all broken up. Used to be, her best friend, tall, blond and hot flirt Sean Addison, could make her smile in seconds. But not anymore. They don’t even talk.

With nothing making sense, Jill tries to pick up the pieces of her life. But when a new guy moves in next door, intense, seriously cute, but with scars—on the inside and out—that he thinks don’t show, Jill finds herself trying to make things better for Daniel. But over one long, hot Arizona summer, she realizes she can’t fix anyone’s life until she fixes her own. And she knows just where to start... (Goodreads).

Some things are easy to fix, but are some things meant to stay broken?

Title: If I Fix You 
Author: Abigail Johnson
Genre: Contemporary, Young Adult, Romance
Goodreads rating: 3.88/5
Pages: 304
Publication: October 25th 2016 by Harlequin Teen
Source: Book Depository | Amazon | Google Books
Reading format: E-book
Review type: Non-spoilery

review

⭐⭐⭐.85

parental abandonment

It took me a week to read this book because I was super busy. I thought I would get used to the busyness of being a high school student when I reach form 5, but I was hella wrong. It was only 304 pages but it took me so long to finish it, even when the plot was intriguing to me.

The synopsis made the story sounds cliche, but as the story unfolds, that assumption is slowly proven to be wrong. It's not totally original, but not absolutely cliché either. You can guess some things to happen but there are some other things that you don't really expect to happen but happen. The story revolves around broken trust and healing from that through connecting with others and the deepest part of yourself. It kept me reading even when I had a lot of other work to do. 

The characters are very likeable. For my past few reads, I've been hating the main girl character in those books, but I love Jill because she handles every problem she has maturely, for a 16-year-old girl. I love her girl best friend too. At first, there are some things that I hate about her, but as I grew to know the characters better, my love for her grew too. For the love interests, I love-hate both Daniel and Sean. I don't exactly hate Daniel, it's just something seemed off about him. Like, there's something still hidden about him even after the story ended. And as for Sean, I just hated him and even by the end of the book, I still didn't like him.

Savage, vicious, relentless. How do you survive something like that? How do you survive being rejected over and over again by the person you tried to protect?

It surprised me that this was only the author's book debut! It's really a good debut for contemporary YA and she can only go up from here.