A review by ethannku
Flirting With Fate by J.C. Cervantes
4.0
3.5 rounded up. Thank you PenguinTeen for an eARC of this book! All opinions are my own.
Ava's grandmother has the ability to pass on blessings to her female descendants, but in order to receive their blessings, they have to be present for her death. Ava gets caught in a storm and a fender bender the night of her grandmother's death, and she thinks that's the end of it until her grandmother's ghost appears. Turns out her grandmother did send out the blessing, but it hit someone else: the boy she got into the fender bender with. To get the blessing back she must form a genuine bond with him, or her grandmother will spend the rest of eternity stuck as a ghost.
I was torn between giving this book 3 or 4 stars, so I settled on 3.5. I thought this book was cute, but parts of it felt juvenile and abrupt. Rion, the love interest, doesn't feel like a fleshed out character, just someone who acts however the author wants him to based on what Ava, the mc's, needs to do. His twin brother, Achilles, also goes through the most rushed character development I've ever read, but I still understood where he was coming from and why he acted the way he did earlier in the book. The two sisters, Carmen and Viviana, were definitely the best characters in this book. I loved their relationship with Ava, they really made me feel like an only-child haha. The grandmother, or Nana, was also a really sweet character, and even her ghost/saint sidekick was pretty nice.
Overall, this book was a cute and quick read, not serious enough to require a huge time commitment, but grounded enough with its messages.
Ava's grandmother has the ability to pass on blessings to her female descendants, but in order to receive their blessings, they have to be present for her death. Ava gets caught in a storm and a fender bender the night of her grandmother's death, and she thinks that's the end of it until her grandmother's ghost appears. Turns out her grandmother did send out the blessing, but it hit someone else: the boy she got into the fender bender with. To get the blessing back she must form a genuine bond with him, or her grandmother will spend the rest of eternity stuck as a ghost.
I was torn between giving this book 3 or 4 stars, so I settled on 3.5. I thought this book was cute, but parts of it felt juvenile and abrupt. Rion, the love interest, doesn't feel like a fleshed out character, just someone who acts however the author wants him to based on what Ava, the mc's, needs to do. His twin brother, Achilles, also goes through the most rushed character development I've ever read, but I still understood where he was coming from and why he acted the way he did earlier in the book. The two sisters, Carmen and Viviana, were definitely the best characters in this book. I loved their relationship with Ava, they really made me feel like an only-child haha. The grandmother, or Nana, was also a really sweet character, and even her ghost/saint sidekick was pretty nice.
Overall, this book was a cute and quick read, not serious enough to require a huge time commitment, but grounded enough with its messages.