I'm giving Ms. Pierson a slight pass because this IS her first book. I could tell that while I was reading, before I looked it up.
This book wasn't the BEST book I've read, but it also wasn't the worst. The biggest complaint I have is that I had to keep changing the words as I was going because it sort of read like an essay instead of a novel. In normal, everyday conversation people say "can't" instead of "cannot" and "won't" instead of "will not." When you're talking with your girlfriends, you're going to say, "I can't go out to night. I have to study." You're NOT going to say, "I cannot go out tonight. I have to study." Things like that were my biggest pet peeve with this book and it was a big enough pet peeve for me to give it a two star rating instead of a three star rating. It is ALWAYS "cannot" in the book. It is NEVER "can't" and that didn't read write for a novel.
Alyssa is a twenty year old college student. She walks in on her boyfriend having sex with another girl. She walks around in a trance for a little over a month when one day she walks into her science lab to discover her lab partner has dropped the class. The only other person without a partner is Rocco. Rocco is the guy that all the girls want and he knows it. He's a total player, but he has his reasons for not getting into relationships. Alyssa finally snaps out of her daze.
These two start a relationship pretty quickly and fall hard and fast for each other. Everything is fine and dandy until Rocco's crazy ex-girlfriend calls him threatening Alyssa's life if he doesn't break up with her. He does. She's devastated. Then he comes to his senses (as you expect in ANY romance novel, so that's not a spoiler). The crazy ex-girlfriend reappears. It all works out in the end for a lovely happily ever after.
The fact that the characters were young made me not really be able to relate to them a whole lot, but it wasn't as bad as other books with young characters. They were NOT overly whiny, obnoxious, and immature. That's a problem a lot of authors have when they write characters who are so young, but Ms. Pierson did a pretty good job with them. The storyline was good and I thought it was a great first effort for this author.
I did like the side characters also, although I felt like there were too many of them for a book with less than 250 pages. At least I wasn't bogged down with physical descriptions of ALL of them.
The story switches back and forth from Alyssa's and Rocco's POVs. This, in itself, doesn't really bother me TOO much, but switching verb tenses bothered me. Sometimes they were talking in past tense and other times they were talking in present tense. THAT is something I don't like, the switching back and forth between tenses. "She walked down the stairs and she's standing in front of me." It's either "She walked down the stairs and stood in front of me." Or "She's walking down the stairs to stand in front of me."
She definitely has potential and I'll look for her books in the future.