Book Review
Title: The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost Kiss
Author: Amy Noelle Parks
Genre: YA/Romance/Humour
Rating: DNF
Review: I didn’t know much about The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost Kiss other than it follows best friends Evie Beckham and Caleb Covic through their first loves and the almost kisses which is also told in dual perspectives which sounded like the fun and light-hearted read I need right now. The novel opens with Caleb’s perspective, he attends Newton Academy, a selective boarding school for maths and science with his best friends Leo and Evie while he is currently denying the fact he is in love with Evie. From Caleb we learn that Evie has no interest in dating and doesn’t appear to understand when she is being asked out and only admits (to himself) that he is love with her when Leo asks him to put in a good word with Evie. We then switch to Evie’s perspective. Evie is someone I instantly related to her with her anxiety issues and almost borderline OCD but it seems to come with the territory of being a genius level student. Evie is currently in therapy for these issues and is advised to make more friends that just Caleb and Bex since they will be leaving for college soon and some friends grow apart as they get older, although Evie is adamant that this isn’t going to happen to her and Caleb. For the rest of this opening part, we are just introduced to the main side characters and their relationships to Caleb and Evie and we are also presented with the idea of Frontier which is a competition for the students to win acceptances and scholarships to the best colleges. Evie has been chosen for Frontier before but due to her anxiety she couldn’t do the presentation required but Caleb is trying to convince her to apply this year since she has been doing much better.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, we learn more about how Caleb fell in love with Evie and the time he asked her to kiss him and she freaked out. It took Evie nearly 6 months before Caleb could say certainly that there were back to where they were before the incident but it hasn’t stopped him loving her which Bex can see, however, Evie is currently taken with Leo and they seem to be developing a bond because he is her only equal in physics but this doesn’t register as anything more than friendship in Evie’s mind. As Evie is slowly awakened to the idea of romance from Bex, she tells her friend that she could never consider dating Caleb because he is too important for her to lose and he doesn’t have the best track record in his relationship although she isn’t fully aware of the fact, he only dated other girls to distract himself from her. This makes things difficult since Caleb is working with Evie on their Frontier project and with Leo on a coding project but he soon finds out that Leo is deliberately messing with their code so he can spend more time with Evie while Caleb is tied up dealing with the code. Meanwhile, Caleb is having a major internal struggle as he is watching Evie get closer to Leo and wants to intervene but doesn’t want to risk their friendship again unless Evie is the one to approach him but it doesn’t stop the boys trying to one up each other. Honestly, I am a ¼ of the way through the novel and I wasn’t enjoying it, the science and coding parts are amazing but everything else seems a little bland and boring and although it is marked at humour there is none of that coming through right now.
At over 30% of the way through the novel, it was becoming clear that I was both extremely bored and not enjoying the plot or characters so I decided to DNF it. Humour and YA romance are genres that are either hit or miss for me and this way a miss but I did enjoy Amy Noelle Park’s writing style and if she branches out in the future I will definitely be open to giving her a second chance.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
留言