This book felt like...well, a train wreck. In order to write a review that is as concise as possible (I hope), I'm going to divide my observations into three main areas. First up:
Characters
Um...so I thought Ammy was awful pretty much from the time she mocked The Hunger Games right up until the end of the book. Her snobby taste in literature aside, she's one of those feminists who apparently thinks it's okay to make rude comments to men for reinforcing antiquated gender norms by daring to (gasp!) politely offer to carry her luggage (through a freaking snowstorm). The nerve!
Now, of course, offering to carry Ammy's luggage isn't the only horrifyingly masculine sin Noah managed to commit throughout the course of this book, and Ammy was kind enough to call him on all of them - including blaming him for a ridiculous set of circumstances that was as much out of his control as it was out of hers. And the worst - the absolute worst part is that Noah bought all of it hook, line, and sinker. He spent half the book apologizing for things he never should have had to apologize for while Ammy used her crappy home life and a pair of X chromosomes to justify her crappy treatment of him without ever really apologizing.
And I just can't. Call me crazy, but I think it's possible to raise a generation of strong women without bringing men down in the process, and I fully believe you don't do that by encouraging behavior like Ammy's.
The irony is that Noah spends half the book waxing poetic about his ex-girlfriend - a girl he eventually comes to realize wasn't a good person for him to be with because she couldn't love him as he was - while simultaneously falling into lust with a girl who treats him just as badly, if for different reasons. He was basically a doormat who sold his soul for a chance to make out with a girl he'd known for less than twelve hours.
Story Structure
So, I actually read the first five chapters of this book via Epic Reads First Five and liked them, which is why I checked this book out from the library in the first place. However, after how disastrously I reacted to Nicola Yoon's The Sun is Also a Star, which builds a(n) unrealistic romance along a similarly condensed timeline, I should have known better.
Look, I'll buy that two people can meet under a difficult set of circumstances and then forge a connection that will eventually lead to a meaningful relationship (and maybe, just maybe, to a forever romance), but I just can't swallow "meant to be" and "she's the one" on the basis of a string of bad decisions and some Super-8-Motel-Cheetos-for-dinner-style making out. I need more than that. And this book didn't deliver.
Reality of the Physical Circumstances
Okay, so I admit I'm a big stickler for small details, especially in books that are set in the real world. Bend reality all you want in a fantasy or a futuristic sci-fi world, but please, for all that's holy, have someone reality check your contemporary real-world novels before you publish them.
I may live in Maryland, where an inch of snow shuts down schools for the day because we don't have the experience or infrastructure to deal well with snow events, but I've been driving for 22 years. While I'm sure they deal with snow in New York better than they do here, I'm still not buying for a minute that an Enterprise would rent a Ford Mustang (presumably still a rear wheel drive vehicle, as most sports cars are) to two teenagers during a snowstorm that shut down the freaking bus line. Or that an entire 55-mile stretch of roads would be magically cleared by snowplows (which are never once mentioned in the course of the book) overnight following a snowstorm that continued at least into late-evening.
Nor do I believe that Noah and Ammy would have traveled 20 miles in 25 minutes during said snowstorm. Most people would have found a hotel in town instead of trying to drive home to begin with, especially given that both of them would have been too late for their respective engagements anyway. And that's not even taking into account the ridiculous sequence of events that led up to that point (such as how they managed to sneak off of a stalled Amtrack train without setting off a buttload of alarms) or the fact that apparently, in this book, the sun has fully risen by 7:02 a.m. in early January in New York (or at least risen enough to warm up a hotel room and blind someone walking out the door of said hotel room).
Does it really take that much extra time to read for these kinds of details? To Google something as simple as what time the sun rises in early January in New York (oh, hey, I did it just this afternoon and found out that the sun rose at 7:19 a.m. this morning, January 23rd, which is three whole weeks after the day this book takes place)? Or to craft a story that doesn't depend so heavily on events that simply wouldn't happen in real life?
Maybe this is a nitpick on my part, maybe most people don't care, but dear Lord, I do.
So, yeah, I guess that's about it.
Bottom line: Definitely not my kind of book.