Review of 17 First Kisses by Rachael Allen

Title/Author: 17 First Kisses by Rachael Allen
Publisher/Date published: Harper Teen, June 17th 2014
How I got this book: received it from the publisher as an egalley

Goodreads summary: No matter how many boys Claire kisses, she can’t seem to find a decent boyfriend. Someone who wouldn’t rather date her gorgeous best friend, Megan. Someone who won’t freak out when he learns about the tragedy her family still hasn’t recovered from. Someone whose kisses can carry her away from her backwoods town for one fleeting moment.

Until Claire meets Luke.

But Megan is falling for Luke, too, and if there’s one thing Claire knows for sure, it’s that Megan’s pretty much irresistible.

With true love and best friendship on the line, Claire suddenly has everything to lose. And what she learns—about her crush, her friends, and most of all herself—makes the choices even harder.

This book and I did not get along. The blurb tricked me into thinking it would be a cute, fun contemporary and instead I got frenemies, an abusive relationship, lots of slut-shaming and basically not even one character to root for.

It REALLY bothered me that Meghan and Claire are called 'best friends'. Seriously, with a friend like that, you really don't need enemies. The rest of their band is just as bad. And OMG, how do you let a boy you know for all of 5 minutes get in the way of this so-called friendship? Ok, you both have the hots for him and that's a tough situation, but I just cannot even with this. It was so dysfunctional! And Meghan already stole one of Claire's boyfriends a couple of years ago, but to be fair, he was Meghan's boyfriend first. WHAT?? I was just staring at this trainwreck of a friendship and being thankful for my own friends.

And I really didn't like Claire. She's constantly slut-shaming other girls, looking down on everyone and it was just not pretty. Also, I didn't like how she went behind Meghan's back with Luke. And also, Luke was no prize either. He was constantly talking shit about Meghan, even though she was his girlfriend and it just really bugged me! And it bugged me that Claire wouldn't stand up for her best friend while he was doing this.
Also, I cannot even begin to tell you how annoying it was to read about this revenge-kissing that Claire did after a bad break up, she went and kissed the guy's 4 bandmates, basically leading one of them on who seemed like a really good guy and didn't seem to really feel bad about this. I don't know who would do such a thing. Not someone I would want to have around.

I'm not entirely sure why I finished this book, I guess I was hoping for it to be fun in the end or something? To have the characters redeem themselves? Neither of these things happened.

My rating: 1,5 stars