TITLE: If Only
AUTHOR: Jennifer Gilmore
RELEASE DATE: July 31st, 2018
READ DATE: July 18th, 2018
PUBLISHING HOUSE: HarperCollins
RATING: ★★★☆☆
ARC provided from the publisher via Edelweiss+ in exchange for an honest review (thank you HarperCollins!!)
If Only follows Bridget first, and then Ivy, two sixteen-year-old girls with two very similar paths but drastically different stories. circa october 2000, Bridget is pregnant and her best course of action is adoption. sixteen years later, in 2017, we meet Ivy, who has lead a charmed life so far. she has two loving mothers, a wonderful best friend, and an amazing boyfriend. but there’s always been something that Ivy’s been missing in her life: her birth mom. following Bridget’s story, Ivy makes it her mission to find out what became of her birth mother, and what would’ve been of all the ‘if only’s, had Bridget done things differently.
i really liked this book, but then i also didn’t. the plot is different, and i really did love some parts of this book (any scene with Ivy’s moms in it was an absolute highlight for me), but then again there were also a lot of things i genuinely didn’t like about If Only.
the writing style was really odd, for one. the interactions between the characters didn’t flow naturally, it felt almost like Jennifer Gilmore was trying to push the words out of these characters’ mouths, with only a small degree of success. there were some pieces of dialogue that just read like plain nonsense, which made the book a little tough to get through since you spend the majority of the time trying to make out what these characters are trying to say. i wouldn’t say it was purple prose-y, but it was definitely something weird and an attempt at show off-y writing that i didn’t particularly enjoy. the word ‘hi’ was also heavily sprinkled throughout the book for no apparent reason. Ivy spends a whole lot of time saying ‘hi’ to no one or nothing, randomly, in between words and sentences. which was strange.
another thing that i also liked but didn’t like were the ‘if only’ scenarios spread throughout the book. we get little glimpses into what Ivy’s life would’ve been like had Bridget done things differently, had she made different choices, and in theory it’s a fantastic and original idea, which i really like!! but then again, these ‘if only’ chapters are thrown at us without context or explanation, which sucks, because it took me about three ‘if only’ chapters to understand that they were supposed to hypothetical scenarios. these hypothetical scenarios were also the introduction to a hypothetical set of new characters, which also only made sense until about 80% of the way into the book, when it’s actually explained where these random characters come from. so, great in theory, terrible in practice.
i think the plot and general storytelling was okay, but i wish we’d learned more about Bridget. we only spend a tiny smidge of time with her, and i don’t think it was enough to truly understand what she went through or how she struggled pre and postpartum.
in general this book was very much just okay. it was fine and the plot was fun and original, but the writing style was weird which just about ruined half of the experience. i just wish the chapters had more context, it would’ve helped LOADS.
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