For their complete lives, Penny and Tate have orbited one another reluctantly. Since earlier than Penny and Tate had been born, their mothers, Lottie and Anna, have been connected on the hip, and this everlasting package deal deal means fixed, undesirable proximity for the 2 daughters. See, Penny and Tate usually are not mates. They’re additionally not not mates. They simply . . . can’t appear to cease nearly kissing at extraordinarily inopportune moments.
But Tate lives with the ever-present risk that her mother’s sickness, a genetic situation that impacts Anna’s lungs and liver, will spiral out of management, whereas Penny lives within the aftermath of a horrific rafting accident that took her father’s life. Penny’s mother, Lottie, has been distant and chilly within the two years for the reason that accident, and Penny tries to tiptoe round her whereas working by way of her personal grief and guilt.
So when Lottie decides to change into a residing liver donor for Anna and mix their two households to economize whereas they recuperate, it’s a shock to the delicate ecosystem that Penny has so fastidiously constructed. There’s no means she and Tate can survive a whole summer time in the identical home with out exploding, so that they resolve to name a truce. Its phrases embrace no combating, no snitching, equitable division of labor and no stressing out their mothers. Unfortunately for Penny and Tate, some issues between them simply can’t keep buried endlessly, truce or not.
6 Times We Almost Kissed (and One Time We Did) might sound just like the title of a candy, comedy-of-errors rom-com, however Tess Sharpe’s novel is just not so fluffy. Although impressed by the (*6*) fan-fiction story idea, the e book playfully subverts reader expectations by being about rather more than six close to kisses. Penny and Tate’s story is wealthy with the complexity of friendship and household and the messiness of grief. Their relationship leans closely right into a quantity of traditional rom-com tropes, together with “only one bed,” roommates and top variations. Both ladies are well-drawn, grounded characters, and their inner struggles really feel emotional and reasonable.
One of the novel’s strongest subplots is the arc of Penny’s relationship together with her mother. Sharpe by no means suggests {that a} relationship as fraught as theirs may be simply mounted with apologies or in a single dialog. Indeed, she acknowledges that such a relationship won’t be doable to restore. Teen readers with tough parental conditions of their very own will really feel validated by the nuance Sharpe brings to this portrayal.
Sharpe untangles the knotted net of her novel with exacting stability and charm whereas by no means compromising the love story at its core. This swoony, Sapphic story is bound to please readers who like their romance with a facet of emotional devastation.
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