My Rating - 3.5 stars
Published - January 2nd 2012 by Poppy/Little Brown
Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything?
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?
My Review
Okay so I'll give it to you straight, Jennifer E. Smith isn't going to be winning any literary prizes with this novel. But then again, I didn't pick this up in the hope of finding the next Rebecca. I just wanted a light, romantic summer read, something to cheer me up after being stuck in the house with a stubborn case of glandular fever.
Some books are great for escapism and this is one of them. I instantly empathised with the plight of 17 year old Hadley, who is crossing the Atlantic to watch her Dad get married to a woman she's never even met. Although Hadley is a reasonably well adjusted teenager her parents divorce hit her hard and she's still reeling from the hole left by her Dad left in her life. Smith develops this aspect of the storyline well and it's encouraging to see how the father-daughter relationship develops and transcends the bitterness and betrayal Hadley feels at the start of the novel.
So, to the love story. I won't pretend the romance between Hadley and Oliver is anything original, it isn't. But it's the kind of fairytale everyone dreams of. In reality Oliver would have invoked a restraining order when Hadley ran around half of London to find him, thankfully though this isn't reality. Of course it isn't a simple straightforward case of boy meets girl, there are twists and turns, the will-they, wont-they moments that keep you turning the pages and crossing your fingers.
Despite being quite predictable and formulaic I was swept along with the story line and found the familiarity of it quite comforting. Sometimes we just want to read something with a happy ending that reaffirms our hopes in all that is good in the world. This is that story.
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