My Favourite Mistake

My Favorite Mistake by Chelsea M. Cameron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a book I really wanted to love. Turns out I was infatuated and ended up only sort-of liking. But I'm not ready to break up with Chelsea Cameron just yet.

This is the typical college romance with a good premise. Girl with tragic past gets assigned a roommate who's a guy with an equally tragic past. Girl throws a fit, boy is immediately infatuated, romance ensues. There's a lot of potential here. The side characters are likable enough and the setting is good. So what went wrong?

My major problem with this book was the character development. Although the female protagonist is off-putting at first, I expected to come to like her. I never did; she was just an angry girl who needed to at least want to get past her tragic childhood circumstances. I never got the sense that she really liked the guy who seemed to be giving her all the problems. There was no well-defined attraction between the two, which is a death sentence for a romance. I kept thinking she needed to get over herself and just give the guy a break.

The male protagonist was fun - very determined and confident. At least he was at first, because as the story progressed he got less and less solid and decidedly more of a doormat. He apologised entirely too much. He gave in way too often. He took responsibility for things that weren't his fault. He didn't stand his ground; he just put up with this girl's petulant attitudes in the interest of sticking it out until she fell for him. Where did the confident, determined guy go?

And then when the actual falling in love happens, it happens far too quickly. There is a very sweet scene that happens when they skip school one day. But it gets quickly shot down by the tragic past that makes a rude entrance. The behaviour that followed was just a little extreme, and the resolution of said behaviour was just not believable. It would have been if it there had been a different lead-in to it, but this girl just does a 180 degree turn from "I hate you" to "I love you" in about two sentences. There is also a bet between the two characters that just doesn't make any sense because it can't be proved. It's arbitrary according to the guy. This is even addressed in their discussion of the bet, but it's never resolved. The ending is very cute in terms of who wins the bet - but by the time it happens, it's pretty contrived and predictable.

Let me also address the cheese factor. Sometimes the dialogue between these two protagonists crossed into seriously high school/early teenaged behavior. Think "no, you hang up first." "No, you hang up first." "No, you." "No, you! (giggle)" Yeah - kind of wanted to kill myself at that point both because it was ridiculous and because it was unnecessary and mostly because it was out of character.

When it comes time to address the tragic past, things are totally overblown. The big emotional showdown scene is completely underwhelming and comments made about the villain are arbitrary. All we know is that this guy is a villain; we're supposed to immediately agree with the main character without any consideration of the villain as a person. This wouldn't be a problem if an offhanded comment weren't made about him, piquing my curiosity. Maybe the guy had a past that played into his crime? We'll never know.

This is by no means a horrible book, even with its flaws. It is a book that tried too hard to be too many things - angry girl, tragic circumstance, determined boy. It's all been executed better in other books by other authors. But that is not to say that Cameron's books won't improve. There's the potential here for her future books to be amazing. I'm up for another one. It will take more than one so-so telling for me to call it quits.



Author with great potential? Definitely. Great story? Not so much.

View all my reviews