Love & Olives

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I loved how the romance was the subplot and how it focuses more on the Father - Daughter relationship. Much of the story is dedicated to Liv’s father’s documentary about Atlantis, and I was so impressed to see multiple theories about it discussed in detail. I think it’s easy for adults to look down on the relationships we form as teenagers as a simple or small thing, but I think those early [romantic] relationships are important.

What I’m really trying to do is figure out how to create this place for a person while they’re sitting at home.And I think it's those same experiences that made me feel very, profoundly sad about some things in this book. If you read this book, you might argue that Olive and Theo got together after or at least a day after she broke up with Dax.

And this story made me cry over the pain, loss, and misunderstanding of what once was and what could have been for Olive and her father. I don’t like stories where the guy overrides a girl’s no because he “knows better” than she does or knows her better than she knows herself, etc.Dax knew her from kindergarten, which was how it worked for most of the people in his prep school—I’d learned quickly that rich Seattle was small Seattle. Things get off to a bit of a rocky start when a strange boy shows up in her Dad's place to pick her up from the airport. Her dad’s teenage film assistant, Theo, helps Liv navigate these feelings, while the two try to calm the chemistry between them.

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. My boyfriend, Dax, slowed his jaunty pace and sighed loudly, not because he needed the extra oxygen, but because this was our third break in less than fifteen minutes.On the plus side, the side characters helped bring some life to the otherwise lackluster cast; I definitely could've used more of Bapou and his magical cakes, Geoffrey the Giant Canadian and his imaginary girlfriend, and even Liv's little brother who appeared for like two seconds. It’s very early in the process, so this might not even be relevant in a year, but I’m writing a book that is set in the United States, which is new to me!

His life goal/dream has been to find the lost city of Atlantis and believes they key is in Santorini. After years of struggling to make ends meet and create a new life for themselves, Olive and her mom are in a good place and Olive has buried the fears from her dad’s abandonment behind her carefully created persona, Liv. I loved the tension between Liv and Theo, but I appreciated that nothing really happened until she broke things off with her boyfriend back in the States. Theo isn’t necessarily a new fictional crush of mine and I wouldn’t say him and Liv are my new YA power couple, but I didn’t mind their relationship.Both have been comfort, easy reads for me, and I was so happy to see there’s an additional one, this time set in Santorini, Greece. He’s also incredibly awkward around her and she finds it only easy to talk to him when they’re with other people. This plays into the pacing issues I found with the book – there was a ton of amazing, heartfelt things in the final quarter of the book, but the first 75% took me a while to read.