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A review by elenajohansen
If I Didn't Care by Kait Nolan
3.0
I thought I had caught up with all the Wishful novels I owned, I missed this one, so here I go.
It's not great, but it's not terrible.
As far as the romance is concerned, I feel the emotion, I feel the weight of the history between our lovebirds, but I'm thoroughly pissed off that everything about them is based on assumptions, misunderstandings, and miscommunication. Autumn opens the book by deciding to confess her feelings despite Judd being in a relationship, but backs down when she realizes (mistakenly) that he's about to propose to his girlfriend. She lies about what she meant to say (twice! when the first excuse doesn't hold up anymore she makes up a new lie!) and decides to leave town even though she doesn't actually want to, because it's better for both of them that way. Judd, on the other hand, has been hiding his feelings as well, telling himself it's for Autumn's good all these years, yet doesn't even tell her when his girlfriend (rightly) dumps him, just letting her assume he's still in a relationship.
So they're both stubborn idiots who would rather martyr themselves for the other than actually talk about anything until events force them to. Which means they're awful people in some ways, yet oddly perfect for each other.
As for the suspense plot, it starts out easy enough to follow, though it was obvious to me from the very beginning that Autumn's ex-con father was a red herring. I didn't catch on to the real culprit until he'd shown up a few times, but it wasn't because there were clues I saw to help me figure it out, it was simply because the cast of characters wasn't large enough to support multiple possible villains. Once I was sure it wasn't daddy dearest, there was only one other character it could be who didn't have a clear role to play elsewhere in the story--especially because a lot of the minor characters we already know from other Wishful books and are clearly not going to be sacrificed on the altar of being a villain in this one.
What bothered me, though, was just how little sense the ending made. It's easy to write off a stalker's behavior as delusional, and it's not always wrong, but his delusions didn't really gel with his demeanor earlier in the story, and basing those delusions on the plot of a novel the heroine has written, that we the readers don't have full access to and have to figure out via explanation by the heroine and third-party interpretation from other characters--honestly, it's a giant mess I couldn't untangle.
And the very, very ending, the "will you marry me?" that becomes "well let's get married literally right now because I organized the whole thing behind your back and everyone's already here"--way too rushed for me. A proposal would have been enough, thanks.
It's not great, but it's not terrible.
As far as the romance is concerned, I feel the emotion, I feel the weight of the history between our lovebirds, but I'm thoroughly pissed off that everything about them is based on assumptions, misunderstandings, and miscommunication. Autumn opens the book by deciding to confess her feelings despite Judd being in a relationship, but backs down when she realizes (mistakenly) that he's about to propose to his girlfriend. She lies about what she meant to say (twice! when the first excuse doesn't hold up anymore she makes up a new lie!) and decides to leave town even though she doesn't actually want to, because it's better for both of them that way. Judd, on the other hand, has been hiding his feelings as well, telling himself it's for Autumn's good all these years, yet doesn't even tell her when his girlfriend (rightly) dumps him, just letting her assume he's still in a relationship.
So they're both stubborn idiots who would rather martyr themselves for the other than actually talk about anything until events force them to. Which means they're awful people in some ways, yet oddly perfect for each other.
As for the suspense plot, it starts out easy enough to follow, though it was obvious to me from the very beginning that Autumn's ex-con father was a red herring. I didn't catch on to the real culprit until he'd shown up a few times, but it wasn't because there were clues I saw to help me figure it out, it was simply because the cast of characters wasn't large enough to support multiple possible villains. Once I was sure it wasn't daddy dearest, there was only one other character it could be who didn't have a clear role to play elsewhere in the story--especially because a lot of the minor characters we already know from other Wishful books and are clearly not going to be sacrificed on the altar of being a villain in this one.
What bothered me, though, was just how little sense the ending made. It's easy to write off a stalker's behavior as delusional, and it's not always wrong, but his delusions didn't really gel with his demeanor earlier in the story, and basing those delusions on the plot of a novel the heroine has written, that we the readers don't have full access to and have to figure out via explanation by the heroine and third-party interpretation from other characters--honestly, it's a giant mess I couldn't untangle.
And the very, very ending, the "will you marry me?" that becomes "well let's get married literally right now because I organized the whole thing behind your back and everyone's already here"--way too rushed for me. A proposal would have been enough, thanks.