(I received this book for free as part of Goodreads First Reads giveaways).

(This review may contain spoilers).

While I haven’t read the first book in this series, I did find this book to be really easy to follow and read, even though I would have liked to see less switching between the different first person perspectives. I found myself keeping on getting confused by which family I was reading about in which chapter.

It was good to have the opportunity to see the relationships of Jenna, Becky, Max and Matthew with their children, but I didn’t really see a lot in the way of differences in the characters. I did especially like seeing Mason, clearly accepted by his family… and I thought he was particularly sweet, particularly with his close relationship with Addy.

It would have been good to see the differences in the couples and their children. For instance, they all seemed to like Star Wars… but I wasn’t very clear on what other interests they either shared or differed in.

While it was good to see some elements of tension in this book, I did feel that a lot of them didn’t really have much of a negative effect on the characters and their relationships. There were some hints of Conner being unhappy about his father not having come home, but those weren’t really expanded upon and I felt those were glossed over quite a bit.

I felt there was quite a bit of information dumping in this book and I would have liked to see more of the other family members in the book. I did find it amusing how the parents kept getting interrupted in their attempts at being intimate… and there were some really sweet family moments at various points in the book.

I liked seeing the family at Christmas and it was cool what Max and Matthew did as their wives’ main present… even though I did feel it was a bit of a cop-out for both of them to do the same kind of present.

I would be interested in reading the first book in this series at some point in the future and also to learn more of the characters and their relationships.

(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review).

(This review may contain spoilers).

This book was short and really easy to read. I thought the idea was a really good one and I did like Amanda as a character. It was interesting to see that there were things that struck Amanda as being wrong, though I would have liked to see a bit more of her life before everything changed.

I thought it was interesting to see the flashbacks to Joan of Arc and Lucretia, though I couldn’t really see how their experiences linked in to Amanda’s history. Since the story started so suddenly, there was very little background given, apart from the information dumping.

It would have been good to see Amanda interacting with other people outside of Nick and ‘Totle’. I would have liked to see more of the world. It came across as very self-contained… and while I did have a lot of sympathy towards Amanda as a child, it was actually very difficult to feel that same sympathy towards her when she was older.

I would have liked to see the book made a bit longer. It seemed to be more of a snapshot of the world and one that I would like to see more of. I felt that the world was too detailed just to be confined to one novella.

I did get a bit thrown by how time moved in the book. After the Joan of Arc flashback, the storyline seemed to skip ahead… but there was little to no detail of what had happened there. While it was good to learn more of Nick by the end of the book, I was very confused when he suddenly started going by the name ‘Nicholas’.

I did find there were some really good scenes of tension in this book, especially with the person trying to get into the lecture hall. I was left with quite a lot of questions by the end of the book and it would have been good to see more of her with Patrick… though not really with her other friends. I didn’t really feel that certain actions Amanda took fit in with what I understood of her character, though.

I would have liked to see more of the world and the characters. I felt this book was more of an introduction to the world and I’d like to see more aspects of it.