In modern romance Delilah Green Doesn't Care, author Ashley Herring Blake's YA roots are showing

 

Delilah Green Doesn't Care, by Ashley Herring Blake, is purportedly a love story between tough girl photographer Delilah and small-town pushover Claire.  But that plot takes a back seat to the more compelling relationship between Delilah and her stepsister Astrid, who is Claire's best friend. 

Blake comes out of the YA world, and it shows in this story about the stepsisters coming to terms with the trauma of their childhood and teen years and moving forward from the hurt they inflicted on each other.  This was a story that made me cry.

I would have liked to have seen Astrid's mother Isabel more developed.  She doesn't make much sense as a character. There's an implication that she never really loved Delilah's father, who died when Delilah and Astrid were ten -- or at least that she never felt that she could be herself around him.  Yet Delilah  has only warm memories of her father, and Isabel seems to have deeply mourned him.  Isabel is the villain of the story, a wicked stepmother figure with no redeeming qualities -- but then why did Delilah's father enter into a relationship with her?

Astrid's relationship with her fiancee Spencer could also benefit from a rewrite.  The implication throughout the book was that Spencer was abusing Astrid, and that she was keeping this a secret from her friends (as is common for abused women).  I kept waiting for the big reveal of bruises.  But it turned out that Spencer is just a run-of-the-mill asshole who Astrid thought she should cater to, even though this was not in keeping with her character in any way.  And Delilah's pranks on Spencer -- pushing him into a lake, putting cayenne pepper in his briefs -- were straight out of a YA playbook.

 

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