Flat-Out Love

Author:  Jessica Park

Series:  Flat-Out Love, Book 1

Year:  2011

Publisher:  Jessica Park

Pages: 389

Goodreads Summary:

Something is seriously off in the Watkins home. And Julie Seagle, college freshman, small-town Ohio transplant, and the newest resident of this Boston house, is determined to get to the bottom of it. When Julie's off-campus housing falls through, her mother's old college roommate, Erin Watkins, invites her to move in. The parents, Erin and Roger, are welcoming, but emotionally distant and academically driven to eccentric extremes. The middle child, Matt, is an MIT tech geek with a sweet side ... and the social skills of a spool of USB cable. The youngest, Celeste, is a frighteningly bright but freakishly fastidious 13-year-old who hauls around a life-sized cardboard cutout of her oldest brother almost everywhere she goes.

And there's that oldest brother, Finn: funny, gorgeous, smart, sensitive, almost emotionally available. Geographically? Definitely unavailable. That's because Finn is traveling the world and surfacing only for random Facebook chats, e-mails, and status updates. Before long, through late-night exchanges of disembodied text, he begins to stir something tender and silly and maybe even a little bit sexy in Julie's suddenly lonesome soul.

To Julie, the emotionally scrambled members of the Watkins family add up to something that ... well ... doesn't quite add up. Not until she forces a buried secret to the surface, eliciting a dramatic confrontation that threatens to tear the fragile Watkins family apart, does she get her answer.

This book snuck up on me. I started off thinking what a cute little story. And then it got serious. Suddenly, I just had to finish the book. I was concerned for the characters. What was going to happen? Would Celeste be OK? What was her problem anyhow? What was the big Watkins family secret? Will Julie find love? Who will she fall in love with? The title is Flat-Out Love anyhow so there has to be love there. Then when I got to the end,  my heart was breaking but it was a satisfied break. I'm obviously moving on the the companion novel very soon.