Small Town Hearts
Lillie Vale
Published by: Swoon Reads
Publication date: March 19th 2019
Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Young Adult
My rating: 3.5 hearts
Rule #1 – Never fall for a summer boy.
Fresh out of high school, Babe Vogel should be thrilled to have the whole summer at her fingertips. She loves living in her lighthouse home in the sleepy Maine beach town of Oar’s Rest and being a barista at the Busy Bean, but she’s totally freaking out about how her life will change when her two best friends go to college in the fall. And when a reckless kiss causes all three of them to break up, she may lose them a lot sooner. On top of that, her ex-girlfriend is back in town, bringing with her a slew of memories, both good and bad.
And then there’s Levi Keller, the cute artist who’s spending all his free time at the coffee shop where she works. Levi’s from out of town, and even though Babe knows better than to fall for a tourist who will leave when summer ends, she can’t stop herself from wanting to know him. Can Babe keep her distance, or will she break the one rule she’s always had – to never fall for a summer boy?
I was a bit disappointed with this one, to be honest. I enjoyed it, sure, but it just didn’t have that extra that would make it amazing. As it was, it was okay. I liked the plot, and I loved the settings, but the characters just… didn’t resonate with me.
Babe was… okay. She’s definitely relatable and realistic. She’s terrified of change, scared that any change will make her lose the people she loves, and I think many teens will relate to that fear of change, and that worry about the future, what happens after high school. (Not me, because I’m just weird and have known since I started high school what I wanted to do with my life.) What disappointed me about her wasn’t that she was flawed, but rather the lack of character development. There was so much potential, and when she didn’t really grow at all, I felt the ending was very unsatisfying.
I didn’t really like Babe’s friends, either, with the exception of Lucy. Penny and Chad just didn’t feel like that great friends to me. Especially Penny. It annoyed me so much how she just used Babe, used her fear of losing her friends. Lucy was great, though. Now there’s a good friend.
The plot was good. It was well-paced and interesting, and the setting added so much to it. Oar’s Rest is just such an idyllic place, and the descriptions really made me want to visit the place. It seems like such a cute place. The plot and the settings, along with the writing, which made it feel so real, is what kept me reading despite my lack of interest in Babe.
The ending was really unsatisfying, to be honest. Mostly because it felt kind of anticlimactic to me. The fact that Babe was, ultimately, the same after everything, that there wasn’t any character growth, really annoyed me. And I really wish something would’ve happened to force her out of her comfort zone. Something a little less predictable.
Lillie Vale, upon discovering she could not be one of Santa’s elves or attend Hogwarts, decided to become a writer to create a little magic of her own. Enjoying the romantic and eerie in equal measure, she’s probably always writing a book where the main characters kiss or kill. Born in Mumbai, she has lived in many U.S. states, and now resides in an Indiana college town where the corn whispers and no one has a clue that she is actually the long-lost caps lock queen. She can be reached on Twitter @LillieLabyrinth and Instagram @labyrinthspine. Small Town Hearts is her debut novel.
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