Did I Mention I Love You? by Estelle Maskame
Genre: YA Realistic Fiction
Blurb (on back of book): Love is everything but expected.
Eden Munro came to California for a summer of sun, sand, and celebrities—what better way to forget about the drama back home? Until she meets her new family of strangers: a dad she hasn’t seen in three years, a stepmom, and three stepbrothers.
Eden gets her own room in her dad’s fancy house in Santa Monica. A room right next door to her oldest stepbrother, Tyler Bruce. Whom she cannot stand. He has angry green eyes and an ego bigger than a Beverly Hills mansion. She’s never felt such intense dislike for someone. But the two are constantly thrown together as his group of friends pulls her into their world of rule-breaking, partying, and pier-hanging.
And the more she tries to understand what makes Tyler burn hotter than the California sun, the more Eden finds herself falling for the one person she shouldn’t love…
MY OPINION: ***
I've been super behind on writing book reviews, mainly because I was just on an academic getaway in Washington DC and have only just returned home. I read this book over two weeks ago and am only now getting to writing the review and have finished almost the entire series, with just a few pages left in the third book. Please forgive me if this review is short and disjointed because quite frankly, I forgot everything that happened.
This book was so cheesy and immature but at the same time I got addicted and had to keep on reading. I'm not quite sure if it was originally a Wattpad book or anything but it sure felt like it was. I was laughing at the absurd plotlines and characters and it very much felt like something written in middle school or early high school. I am not saying it was bad or anything, it just definitely felt like it was written by someone younger with a hopeless romantic mindset and flighty hopes and dreams.
Eden is a sixteen-year-old Portland resident who has decided to move to Santa Monica to go live with her absentee father for the summer. Her father had left her family a few years back and had since then begun a new life with a new woman and her three sons. Eden is thrust into a new world with new stepsiblings and a new stepmom and soon realizes that her father is just as much the asshole that she remembers him as.
Tyler is the oldest of Eden's three stepbrothers and has been going through the generic teenage-boy-angst-rebellion stage of adolescence, in which he often leaves the house without telling anyone, gets drunk and high, and basically rebels in any way possible against his family. Eden instantly dislikes him, setting up the enemies-to-lovers plotline.
Now, some of you may be thinking, Tyler's the love interest??! And yes, unfortunately, her stepbrother is the main love interest of this book. I personally strongly disliked this trope and was contemplating quitting the book once I realized this was a stepsibling romance but persevered, mainly because this has been on my TBR for a long time and everyone I know always has good things to say about it.
However, as time goes on, Eden and Tyler begin to connect. They end up in the same friend group and although Eden has some romances with some of the other boys in the group, she's drawn to Tyler for some inexplicable reason. Besides the fact that he's a "bad boy" drunk-high-rebel, he's also her stepbrother and quite obviously off-limits. Despite all of this, they end up falling in love.
I personally didn't feel any chemistry between them and feel as if they were mainly attracted to each other for the sole reason that it was forbidden. Something about the idea of a forbidden love is what I believe drew them together, because they barely even talked before suddenly they were obsessed with the other. Also, I didn't like Tyler or Eden, which may have skewed my opinion on their relationship, but overall, I just didn't ship the two. However, something about the absurdity of their entire fling-relationship was addictive and I kept wanting to read more to figure out what happened.
TW: eating disorders, bullying. Another plot point in the book is Eden's love-hate relationship with food and eating and gaining weight. She was bullied by her own friends at home in Portland for her weight and has since then always been obsessed with watching what she eats and how many calories she was consuming. I liked how the book dealt with her self-confidence, or lack thereof, because it felt real and honest. I also liked how Tyler wasn't the final solution to her self-image issues and instead, she worked on it herself. Obviously he helped but it wasn't as if he were the end-all-be-all to her being happy with herself and her body.
The ending was annoying and I absolutely hated their relationship status at the end of this book. I will say that Tiffany, Tyler's girlfriend, is one of the most annoying, awful characters I've ever had the chance to read about. She was always in the way and was truly a manipulative, awful person, and while I never condone cheating, a small part of me didn't feel bad for her throughout this book solely because of the character she constantly proved herself to be.
Overall, I would recommend this book to readers looking for a simple, generic summer romance.
Main Character: Eden
Sidekick(s): Tyler, Rachael, Meghan, Jake, Dean, etc
Villain(s): Society, bullying, Tiffany, etc
Realistic Fiction Elements: This book was all very real to life.
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