Title: Dear Delilah
Author: T. Bester
Genre: New Adult
Rating: 2/5 Stars
Published: August 2017
It has been said that boys and girls can never be ‘just’ friends, and until Nathan Penn barged into my life, I thought it was complete and utter nonsense. But one night changed everything, and what I thought was the defining moment in our friendship turned out to be more than either of us were ready for.
When my boss tasks me with writing the University’s new sex advice column, Dear Delilah, I make it quite clear that I’m the least qualified person for the job – my experience is limited to one sexual encounter that taught me about love and loss all at once.
So what makes me say ‘yes’?
Simple.
A distraction.
Something to take my mind off Nathan.
But once I start, I find myself wanting to be the voice of the girl who’s too afraid to ask for advice, the girl who wants to own her sexuality but doesn’t know how. Sounds easy enough.
Except it isn’t.
It’s complicated, and messy and awkward, and when Nathan offers to help, I’m caught between a rock and his hard place. Literally.
It’s only when my identity is threatened that I realize I might be in over my head. With all of it.
I received this book from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.
After reading the synopsis for this book, I was really excited to dive right in, thinking it would be a fun book to fly through. I was mistaken. According to my kindle, I only had an hour reading time left and I decided to DNF this book, I cannot finish it. I can’t recall ever reading a book where I didn’t care what happened to the characters in the end, until this one.
The characters were flat. I don’t think they had any loveable traits. If you were to take out the dialogue tags, I couldn’t tell you who might say what because everyone was just that boring. The character development was almost non-existent in this novel. The only character that had any ‘spunk’ was Nathan’s sister and I got really annoyed with her because it seemed like she was pressuring Sav too much to be sexually empowered. She did not sit well with me.
The setting was bland. It really bothered me that it felt like Sav was always just sitting in the room and no one else was around. What do I mean by this? When she went into the newspaper department, I never saw anyone else there but Toby. When I hear talk of a school newspaper, I think of the newspaper from Gilmore Girls where people were always bustling around, trying to meet deadlines, this newspaper just seemed… dead. It was as if Toby, Nathan and Sav were the only staff. I wanted more description. It seemed like Sav and her friends were the only people who existed on campus.
The romance was not swoon-worthy. I love romance, but there really wasn’t any in this novel. Nothing about Nathan seemed to make him good book boyfriend material. I’ve seen more loveable villains.
Why did I not give this one star if I hated it so much? Because I feel like this had the opportunity to be a really good book. From other reviews I’ve read, everyone loved the synopsis, but the writing was lacking. I’m assuming since this was an ARC, there were drastic changes that were made between when I received it a few months back and the actual publication. My copy read more like a first (very) rough draft.
breannareadsberks 