I'm very torn about this book. I'll give it 2.5 stars, but I'm honestly going back and forth on it.
To start off, this book is told in two different voices and two different time lines. Half is a modern day narration from Lexi, who is trying to figure out more about her mom's past because her dad won't tell her anything (more on that later). The other half is told by her mom, Emma, back when she lived on Mackinac Island.
I really enjoyed reading Emma's chapters, but Lexi's were kind of slow and a little boring for me. There was a lot I liked about this book but a lot I didn't like. To fully explain, I'm going to have to include some spoilers.
The atmosphere in general was beautiful, I loved the setting and descriptions. I was very invested in Emma's story the whole time, and I really genuinely cared about her and her friends. I was honestly heartbroken about how her friendship with Linda turned out and how they never got closure or any type of reconciliation with one another. While reading Emma's chapters, I somehow forgot that she obviously ended up dying and was really sad when I remember towards the end of the book that it was heading for an inevitable ending. It didn't really explain how she died which bothered me a little, it just said 'her heart gave out' so that kind of leaves room for speculation I guess.
The beginning of the book was a lot of fun. Sure, all the characters had some sort of unpleasant situation going on in their lives but the important thing was that they had each other. The friend group, made up of Emma, Linda, Jr. and Ryan, was really sweet. It's a super fun book to read in summer and I loved reading about the four of them having fun together and leaning on one another for support.
As for the beginning in Lexi's pov, she receives her mom's old mosaic chest and decides to make up a huge lie and go behind her dad and step mom's back to basically run away while they think she's visiting colleges. This obviously isn't right, and if she had to face the consequences of it, I'd be fine. But she had literally zero consequences for her actions. None. She lied to her parents, spent a ton of money, and overall just made some pretty bad decisions and didn't have to deal with any of it. In the end, it made it seem like her dad was the one who needed to apologize becausehe wouldn't tell her anything about her mom and that's what drove her to leave (again-theres a lot to unpack with her dad).
The middle was where stuff really started to unravel on Emma's side of the story. She's dating Ryan now and Jr. is acting really distant and for some reason she can't see the connection between those two things. Then there's a big dramatic fire and Jr. is sent to juvie for causing it. After the fire, it's implied that it took a ton of work to get the hotel up and running again, but we see none of it. I guess that makes sense because fire repairs would be pretty boring to read about. Things get really tense between Emma and her parents because she wants to become an artist and they want her to take on the family business. If I'm honest, after a while I was tired of them reiterating the problems between Emma and her parents because neither of them was being very logical and they simply wouldn't listen to each other.
On Lexi's end, she's really just figuring out what happened to her mom with the fire and everything. She also becomes friends with an incredibly rude old woman who used to be famous and seems to worship her even though this old lady is kind of evil. That seems to happen with old people, though. They can get away with being evil just because they're old. Once again, I found it kind of boring. Also, sidenote, Lexi is supposedly depending on her older step sister to research colleges and tell her about them so that Lexi can lie to her dad, but we never see any of that happen. She seems to barely communicate with anyone the whole time she's there and also faces no consequences for that except when her step sister yells at her over the phone once or twice.
Then there was the ending. I read the ending in one night, and I'm not talking 50 pages. I read the last 100+ pages of this book in one sitting because I was so desperate to know what happened.
On Emma's side, it's the next summer after the huge fire and she's still dating Ryan but stuff between her parents are still strained while Ryan is getting along really well with his dad. Last summer, he and his dad fought a lot so it's obviously pretty weird to see them sort of being friends and it kind of felt forced for the plot. Emma is sort of gaslighting herself into thinking that she'll be happy going to college with Ryan and everything will work out if she just plays the part of the perfect girlfriend. She keeps telling herself that she has to do things for him because he's so amazing and forgiving which really annoyed me. Then Jr. shows up and everything just goes downhill from there.
To sum it up, there's a big plot twist and Ryan ends up joining the military and then Emma breaks up with him while he's at basic training and gets together with Jr. The plot twist was one that I predicted from a mile away, just like the other major plot twist, which we'll get to in a second. The whole breakup with Ryan is weird to me because it depended on the fact that we find out he started the fire and watched Jr. get in trouble for it and said nothing. They relationship between him and Emma is so odd to me because they really don't seem to fit well together at all. She cheats on him, he manipulates her. There's very little communication and in the end I felt like they were only placed together to keep Emma and Jr. apart and add tension.
For Lexi, she's kind of spiraling and having a huge breakdown at the end of the book because she thinks that Jr. is her dad and her dad at home isn't actually her biological father. She meets Linda and honestly they have a pretty sad conversation that gives Linda's perspective on the whole thing. Lexi also has this sort of romance with a hotel worker named Casey that never gets resolved. Also, Lexi seems like she doesn't have friends because over the course of the week that she's on Mackinac nobody except her dad and step sister reach out to her, and Casey who she just met.
At the end her dad showed up and we find out the big twist, which is that her dad, Mathew Carter, is Jr. I predicted it from the literal beginning of the book but I'm glad that's how it ended up. However, it kind of makes everything weird in my opinion. Since her dad is Jr., it makes sense that he was really upset when Emm died but it doesn't make sense that he would turn into such a cold father to his daughter and never tell her anything about her mom. I understand that it had to be this way for the story to happen at all, but it feels just like it was used as a convient way for Lexi to go on this trip. Her dad had to be mean and tell her nothing to push her to go on the trip to Mackinac in the first place. Once her dad finds her, he's changed his attitude completely with no explanation. He's not even mad that his daughter lied to him and drove hours away to an island and spent probably thousands of dollars on gas and the hotel. Again, she faces no consequences at all and it makes it seem like her dad was entirely in the wrong. Obviously I do believe that it was wrong for her dad to keep things from her and tell Lexi nothing about her mom, but it felt really unrealistic to his character to do that in the first place.
There's a lot of instances where I feel like some characters did things unrealistic to their actual character just to keep the plot going, which really annoyed me.
Overall, I liked the story of Emma even though in the end it was honestly kind of heartbreaking. I did shed a few tears during the last chapters of the book. And that's why I'm so torn. I loved the story, the characters and the setting. But some things made me mad and also made no sense. I could also see an agenda inserted in a really clunky way that annoyed me. It added nothing to the story and just felt like it was there for brownie points.
So I'm going with 2.5 stars. I'm glad I read it and I honestly might read it again, only for the atmosphere and characters. I would recommend to people who really enjoy a 'Love and Gelato' type of book, as long as you can get past the things I mentioned.