The Never Ending Bookshelf

Title: The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

Author: Jennifer E. Smith

Publication date: January 2, 2012

Blurb:

Today should be one of the worst days of seventeen-year-old Hadley Sullivan’s life. Having missed her flight, she’s stuck at JFK airport and late to her father’s second wedding, which is taking place in London and involves a soon-to-be stepmother Hadley’s never even met. Then she meets the perfect boy in the airport’s cramped waiting area. His name is Oliver, he’s British, and he’s sitting in her row.

A long night on the plane passes in the blink of an eye, and Hadley and Oliver lose track of each other in the airport chaos upon arrival. Can fate intervene to bring them together once more?

Quirks of timing play out in this romantic and cinematic novel about family connections, second chances, and first loves. Set over a twenty-four-hour-period, Hadley and Oliver’s story will make you believe that true love finds you when you’re least expecting it. From Goodreads.com

My Review:

I just want to point out that I didn’t realize that it dealt with a girl traveling to England (since I started reviewing books, the contemporary young adult fiction I’ve been reading dealt with England in some way). This is another typical contemporary young adult fiction dealing with divorced parents and teen love. Somehow I just realized that divorced parents and remarriage are a common with the main characters in contemporary young adult. This book has that common conflict.

This is a cute little read of a normal teenage girl who is troubled with her dad leaving her family for a British woman. It’s been about a year or two and her dad is about to remarry. The problem? She has to go to the wedding. She has to take a plane ride from the USA to England and worries about having to meet the bride for the very first time. Within that plane ride, she meets a boy her age who practically becomes that one person she comforted and in love.

Pretty average plot. Same with the conflict. I did somehow like this character. There were times where she did seem annoying. But she had an attitude that reflected a normal average joe teenager. For example the character talked about being nervous sitting next to a stranger on a plane for seven hours and she also couldn’t help but talk about the British accents. For the love interest character Oliver, I wished that he went by a nickname. Only once was he called Ollie (at least I think that happened). It seemed unnatural that a boy his age would want to called Oliver. But I could be completely and utterly wrong with my opinion.

There were quite a few things that made me dislike this book. One was how short the main character’s relationship with her love interest. Obviously this book is talking about love at first sight which is why the love story was instant, but I wish it was more love and less of the marriage. Not that it was bad, but the first part of the book was the love story and the second part were concerning the family problems. I didn’t quite like the prologue. I’m not that big of a fan of prologues for the reason of them sometimes being pointless. Here I felt that the prologue could have been the beginning of the first chapter. There are some points that are predictable. Yet there are times where I guessed some of the plot and was wrong. I would say the predictability of this book is average.

Overall I give this book a 3.5 out of 5 stars. This again is a cute little story. If you’re a fan of love at first sight stories and/or British boys (One Direction, Tom Daley, etc), then this could be that book for you. Now that I think about it, me being a fan of British boys is probably the reason why I ended up gravitating towards this book. Oops!

Happy reading!