Review : The Boy Most Likely To by Huntley Fitzpatrick

Summary (from Goodreads) 

Title : The Boy Most Likely To
Author : Huntley Fitzpatrick
Publication Date : August 18th 2015
Publisher : Penguin Teen
Goodreads - Amazon - Barnes & Noble

Surprises abound and sparks ignite in the highly anticipated, utterly romantic companion to My Life Next Door

Tim Mason was The Boy Most Likely To:
- find the liquor cabinet blindfolded
- need a liver transplant
- drive his car into a house

Alice Garrett was The Girl Most Likely To:
- well, not date her little brother’s baggage-burdened best friend, for starters.

For Tim, it wouldn’t be smart to fall for Alice. For Alice, nothing could be scarier than falling for Tim. But Tim has never been known for making the smart choice, and Alice is starting to wonder if the “smart” choice is always the right one. When these two crash into each other, they crash hard.

Then the unexpected consequences of Tim’s wild days come back to shock him. He finds himself in a situation that isn’t all it appears to be, that he never could have predicted . . . but maybe should have.

And Alice is caught in the middle.

Told in Tim’s and Alice’s distinctive, disarming, entirely compelling voices, this return to the world of My Life Next Door is a story about failing first, trying again, and having to decide whether to risk it all once more.

Personal Thoughts

You know what's one of the worst feelings ever? Not loving a book that you've been waiting forever for from a favorite author. It's no secret that Huntley Fitzpatrick is an auto-buy author for me as she is for many other readers. Her debut book especially holds a special place on my book shelf. When I found out that she was going to revisit the Garretts and Tim from My Life Next Door, I was eager to get a copy of The Boy Most Likely To. I don't know if it was the high expectations, but The Boy Most Likely To wasn't as memorable for me as the author's previous books.

While this book is told in the dual POVs of Tim and Alice, Tim got the most page space. From book 1, we know that Tim was a boy who had a rather rough family life and that he was struggling with a lot. Being inside Tim's head wasn't always the easiest, to be honest and while I think Huntley Fitzpatrick did a lovely job at crafting the male POV with an authentic voice, I wasn't able to completely connect with his character. I think my main issue with this book was that Tim had all these problems in his life - alcoholism, shitty parents, strained sibling relationships, being kicked out of school - but I wasn't sure where they all stemmed from. I needed to get a good grasp of where all his emerging from and while we may be told briefly, I wasn't convinced by it. And then when the big twist came up, I was a little bit frustrated because everything seemed so excessive. The boy was already battling with so much, so to have yet another storm smack him in the face seemed just a bit too much. That being said, this twist did push Tim to finally grow up slowly over the course of the book but by the end, I still felt like Tim had much growing to do. I will admit that Tim could be very endearing when he showed his more lighthearted side, especially when it came to Patsy and Alice Garrett, but I'm sad that I didn't love him as much as I loved Jase. I felt similarly towards Alice. She didn't have that spark and energy that I found in Sam in My Life Next Door. I don't particularly have much to say about her because she wasn't memorable for me. I did, however, love seeing the Garretts again, especially George who continued to be the cutest boy ever.

The romance between Tim and Alice was very slow to develop, sometimes, excruciatingly slow. Part of me thought that the romance was a little bit lacking because I wanted to see more of Tim and Alice together. The moments we did have of them though were very sweet and I think if there had been more scenes I would have fallen for this couple just as much as I fell for Sam and Jase. Like I mentioned before, there was just so much going on in this book not only with Tim, but also with Alice having to deal with her dad's accident and her having to upend her entire life to take care of her siblings. It's clear that Huntley Fitzpatrick wanted to tackle all these themes in her book, but it made for a mess, in my opinion, with none of the themes well-fleshed out. This book had the potential to turn me into a blubbering sobbing mess, but because all of the issues were skimmed upon, they came across as weak and did not have that strong of an emotional punch as it could have had. I do think this could have been achieved if the focus had been on one or two themes and building up those themes to perfection. Even with the issues I had with The Boy Most Likely, I loved Huntley Fitzpatrick's writing, which is why I pushed through 432 pages of this book. While this may not have been her strongest book for me personally, I will continue to pick up anything that she writes because her writing is so lovely.

One of my recurring thoughts while I was reading The Boy Most Likely To was that it read a lot like an angsty New Adult book. So even though this was a bit of a disappointment for me, I appear to be a bit of a black sheep. I think if you are a reader that enjoys angst in their books together with more mature storylines, The Boy Most Likely To will work wonderfully for you.

Rating 

Cover : 4/5
Plot : 3/5
Characters : 3/5
Writing : 4/5

**Overall Rating : 3.5/5**

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Teen for the e-ARC of The Boy Most Likely To.