Book Review: Love Unscripted

I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley, for the purposes of reviewing.

Wow.  I haven't read a book in a long time that had so much extraneous information included.  I kept getting bogged down and outright bored with the play-by-play of where people were sitting or what they were wearing or the relationship state of someone unimportant to the overall plot.  The formatting sucked.  Quotation marks were used in place of apostrophes throughout, and that made this slow read even more torturous.  There were lines missing, or inserted two pages later, and lines breaks between chapters were frequently missing.  I'm hopeful that these issues are fixed in the actual published copies.

This book is written in first-person.  It's unusual, and not every author can make it work.  Though Taryn is theoretically 27 or 28, the book, particularly the beginning, reads as though she's just out of high school.  She's fixated on stuff that an older adult just wouldn't think too much about anymore, with totally juvenile thought processes about men and their relative hotness factors.

I really liked Ryan and Taryn at first.  They seemed to genuinely like each other and watching an actor fall in love with a "nobody" and vice versa was interesting.  Then, when Ryan left Taryn's city once filming was done, their relationship wasn't so easy and they each had issues with the other.  Ryan turned into an overbearing uber-jealous prick with anger control issues, and Taryn became a super-gullible untrusting brat, and it just went downhill from there.

The denouement was way over the top, though well-written, and then the end was just too treacly for words.  "I'm sorry."  "No, I'm sorry."  "I love you."  "I love you more."  "Let's live happily ever after."  Gag me with a spoon.  Yeah, I know.  The eighties called and they want their colloquialism back.

For me, this book was just too long, stuffed with too much unnecessary information, and the way the relationship played out was unbelievable.  Taryn's physical attraction to Kyle was given far too much emphasis, considering she's in love with Ryan, and whether or not she was attracted to Kyle had no meaning to the plot.

On the plus side, there were parts of the book that were extremely nicely done and touching.  The early days of the relationship had many adorable and funny moments, and though packed with a lot of tell rather than show, were enjoyable to read.