I still had a hard time because I worried that somehow he wouldn’t be accountable for the hurt he’d caused.

Both go by nicknames (Olive becomes Liv, and Carolina becomes Lina), and even these nicknames are pretty similar. That all goes downhill when Liv receives a letter from her dad, who left them when she was 8 to go back to Greece and hasn’t been in contact with them since. She’d been on UC Berkeley’s waitlist for almost six months, and I’d seen how hard she’d worked on her SAT prep. From the bestselling author of Frankly in Love comes a contemporary YA rom-com where a case of mistaken identity kicks off a string of (fake) events that just may lead to (real) love.At 16, she plucked a copy of Sloppy Firsts off the "New Releases" shelf and hasn't stopped reading YA since. I’m enjoying books set in foreign, exotic countries in the midst of this lockdown and this book sounds like something I would definitely read! I felt like she was flinching away from her dad, flirting but not flirting with the love interest and thinking she knew everything throughout the whole book until the end.

I was definitely more focused on the father-daughter dynamic …and actually how Liv was going to deal with her relationship with Dax (aka her real boyfriend at home). It was a pick that we read in a reading group I am a part of, and I am sad to say that I am not the only one who was disappointed. I loved the interactions between characters and how Welch incorporated some heavier topics throughout.

Although hunting for Atlantis made me hesitant about this book at first, I adored how it was woven into this story.

The bookstarted out pretty slow and was following the general trajectory for a light, contemporary summer read, but then partway through, Welch decided she wanted to do more with the story, which is fine, except it was kind of thrown together last minute without any thought to how the pieces fit together to make one cohesive story. The muscles in Dax’s jaw tightened, and I held my breath, already regretting the conversation that was about to happen.

It’s not like I was an active aqua phobic carrying nine years of emotional baggage onto a boat held together by duck tape. In 2020 where we can barely go between different states in the US, I was eager to read a book set overseas in a different pandemic-less time. The other characters were also all very lovable (except Dex) and I loved seeing Liv grow so much in just 10 days. Liv had an amazing family, a wonderful mother, an interesting boyfriend, and a charming- albeit nosy Theo.