Falling in Love with English Boys by Melissa Jensen

 

Sixteen-year-old Catherine Vernon has been stranded in London for the summer—no friends, no ex-boyfriend Adam the Scum (good riddance!), and absolutely nothing to do but blog about her misery to her friends back home. Desperate for something—anything—to .do in London while her (s)mother’s off researching boring historical things, Cat starts reading the 1815 diary of Katherine Percival her mom gives her—and finds the similarities between their lives to be oddly close. But where Katherine has the whirls of the society, the parties and the gossip over who is engaged to who, Cat’s only got some really excellent English chocolate. Then she meets William Percival—the uber-hot descendant of Katherine—and things start looking up . . .

 

The first thing that drew me towards this cover was the title, and then the cover, and then the summary. I think that readers tend to overlook a book sometimes because of its title and cover, and I think I may have fallen victim to that.

Because I love the title and cover so much, I wasn’t expecting the storyline to live up to them, but it did. Falling in Love with English Boys had both a killer contemporary plot and an interesting historical one, so I was anxious to dive into reading it. Once I read it (in one sitting) I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Melissa Jensen is a spectacular writer who captured me at the opening sentence. The characters were all really well developed and it felt like I was talking to a group of my friends. My main complain is that the historical part of Falling in Love with English Boys went slower than the contemporary part.

This book made me cry like a baby. It also made me send frantic texts to friends really really late at night. I felt personally connected to the characters and everything that happened was like an emotional jerk.

I recommend Falling in Love with English Boys to reluctant historical fiction readers, and anybody who loves a little YA romance.

FTC- Bought.