Review: 99% Mine by Sally Thorne

99% Mine 
Sally Thorne
Piatkus
2019, 368p
Copy courtesy Hechtete AUS via NetGalley

Blurb {from the publisher/Goodreads.com}:

Crush (n.): a strong and often short-lived infatuation, particularly for someone beyond your reach . . .

Darcy Barrett found her dream man at age eight – ever since, she’s had to learn to settle for good enough. Having conducted a global survey of men, she can categorically say that no one measures up to Tom Valeska, whose only flaw is that he’s her twin brother’s best friend – oh, and that 99 percent of the time, he hasn’t seemed interested in her.

When Darcy and Jamie inherit a tumble-down cottage from their grandmother, they’re left with strict instructions to bring it back to its former glory and sell the property. Darcy plans to be in an aisle seat halfway across the ocean as soon as the renovations start, but before she can cut and run, she finds a familiar face on her porch: house-flipper extraordinaire Tom’s arrived, he’s bearing power tools, and he’s single for the first time in almost a decade.

Suddenly Darcy’s considering sticking around – just to make sure her twin doesn’t ruin the cottage’s inherent magic with his penchant for chrome. She’s definitely not staying because of her new business partner’s tight t-shirts. But sparks start to fly – and not just because of the faulty wiring. Soon, a one percent chance with Tom is no longer enough. This time around, Darcy’s switching things up. She’s going to make Tom Valeska 99 percent hers.

Two and a half years ago, or thereabouts, I read Sally Thorne’s debut novel, The Hating Game and it became an absolute favourite. I re-read it obsessively – I absolutely adored those characters. I’ve been waiting quite eagerly for her next book although I know it obviously won’t be another The Hating Game. However the weight of expectations plays a role in how we feel about books, so I’m stating upfront that quite possibly that has contributed here.

I didn’t love this. I actually really struggled with it and considered DNF’ing it more than once. It’s not the writing per se, I think for me the biggest problem I had was just the characters. I didn’t connect with either of them (the main two, Darcy and Tom). I found Darcy very abrasive and overly, deliberately quirky, which is something I never enjoy in a character. So much is made of how ‘different’ she is – her hair, her dress, her jobs, her inability to settle down, her free spirit. She’s also very forward and a lot of the way she thinks/talks/acts towards Tom made me think vaguely of sexual harassment and objectification. I tried role switching, making it like Darcy was a man, thinking/saying etc these things towards a female character and it made me pretty uncomfortable. Darcy also has a heart condition, which is referred to every other page or so but don’t ask me what it is because the book never makes it clear because Darcy mostly ignores it. It’s serious enough that she should be having regular visits to her cardiologist but she doesn’t bother because she doesn’t want to know, and she’s a free spirit etc. Everyone keeps talking about how this heart condition could literally kill her but she just pretends it isn’t there for almost the entire book and then at the end it’s fixed mostly off page almost as a by-the-way type of thing, which was a bit weird.

Tom is mostly pleasant, although sometimes his character seems inconsistent. At first he’s this super nice, shy, blushes-at-everything-Darcy-says sort of guy but at some stage he Hulks out into some possessive, over-protective Alpha male when the book tries to make it super obvious that Darcy can handle herself (she works in a bar frequented by types that need handling) except when she can’t and needs help. There’s a lot of unnecessary drama surrounding Tom’s quote on the renovation and how he’s Darcy’s twin brother’s best friend and the whole ‘my sister is off limits’ thing has never really done it for me. Darcy’s brother is mostly a jerk until suddenly he’s completely not and the random way he turns out to have a relationship with someone is really bizarre. In fact, if I had to think of one word to describe this book, it’d probably be random. Things just happen randomly, things are randomly not explained, the entire conflict for the last part of the book makes no sense and I found the resolution very weak.

There were parts of this that I did enjoy – some of the banter was funny, I liked the home renovation stuff (I enjoy reading books set around that sort of thing) and I really loved Darcy’s friend and her underwear business. That was amazing. But I think for me the book needed more scenes to share the background of Darcy, Jamie and Tom, flesh out their childhood and teenage connection. It didn’t really seem to translate well to the current day setting without that and I just wanted a bit more. I didn’t really feel much chemistry between Darcy and Tom unfortunately and they just weren’t a couple that I felt myself passionately behind. This just wasn’t my sort of story.

6/10

Book #194 of 2018

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