Callie Schineller's Reviews > Begin Again

My rating: 2/5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for this audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Disclaimer: I know the YA rom-com genre guarantees a lot of the things that my review critiques, but despite the genre, I am still going to provide my complete, honest review including such critiques.

Another disclaimer: This wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t for me. I think the target demographic is a lot younger than me (and probably hasn’t had a real college experience yet.) There are plenty of readers who will adore this book (like fans of Lynn Painter); I am just not one of them.

I found the entire book to be unrealistic. I’ve never heard of a college with as light a drinking culture as the one in this book, nor one where college-aged kids would act like this. They felt incredibly young and naive, to the point where most of them irritated me. Andie, the main character, was the most irritating of them all— her optimism didn’t hit me as endearing the way it was probably meant to. She swapped out the names of her favorite snack foods for swear words, and naively seemed to believe that giving out advice via a high school newspaper advice column (and then a college radio show) was her solving everyone’s problems. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against optimism or empathy, but Andie’s attitude was just… too much for me. Plus, everyone else acting as though Andie was god’s gift to the world because of super common sense advice she gave bothered me.

Beyond that, the whole Knight’s Watch radio show felt very Radio Rebel to me, and the idea of a ribbon hunt to join secret societies was just so random and odd. The concept is cute, but that’s kind of all it is. Shay, Andie’s roommate, being a bookstagrammer also annoyed me, like the author was trying to do a *wink wink* to the book community— it was too on-the-nose.

I don’t mean to be overly negative, but this whole book just felt very surface-level to me. (Which, again, I know is a side effect of it being a YA rom-com.)

I had some issues with the audiobook in particular too. The narrator’s voice matched up with Andie’s personality/character pretty well, but there were some things about the narration that bothered me. For example, Valeria starts out sounding totally normal, and then randomly gets a super strong New York accent like a third of the way through the book. And then sometimes when there’s dialogue between Valeria and another character without an accent, the narrator seems to forget to switch back, and so then they’re both talking with the horrendous New York accent. (And by the way, Valeria is never described as having a New York accent, so that must have been the narrator’s choice. Why? I’ll never know.)(Warning: these next critiques are kind of small, petty things.) She also always pronounced “library” like “libary,” and at one point pronounced “staunch” as “stanch.”

Anyways, I think I’m just unable to see past all the unrealistic parts of a book like this and enjoy it as the cutesy fluffy rom-com it’s meant to be.

Link to my visual review: https://www.instagram.com/p/CnIIdSsv6...