Indecision is a novel by Caragh Bell. It’s the first in the Follow Your Heart series.
[I got this book from a LibraryThing Early Reviewer Give-Away. I am not early with my review, but honest.]
Finished on: 30.9.2018

Plot:
Lydia loves her boyfriend Dominic with whom she’s been quite a long time already. When she moves away to do a Master’s degree, the separation isn’t easy to take. Plus, there’s Luca right there beside her: gorgeous, flirty, American, he is as intriguing to her as he is off-limits. But the effect he has on her makes her start to question her life’s decisions so far.

Indecision, unfortunately, didn’t work for me. It was badly written and full of unlikable and/or clichéd characters. I found it an exhausting read.

I don’t really know where to start with this book. Let’s take the central love triangle that just never worked for me: Luca, to me, remained an asshole and I just couldn’t understand why Lydia would fall for him. At all. I felt mostly sorry for Dominic, I have to say, but at least it was something that Bell didn’t feel the need to make him into an asshole to make it more plausible that Lydia would feel something for somebody else. Although there was the scene where Dominic is basically painted as a hero for asking the family’s elderly, athritic housekeeper if she needs any help, but letting her work anyway. And of course, they won’t let her retire because she’s part of the family and she sure loves her work.

Then there was the writing. On the one hand, the pacing just didn’t work out for me. There was plenty of unnecessary detail that slowed things down and didn’t add much to the story. But whenever the story touched on emotionally important things (like Luca trying to talk about his parents or Colin confronting Lydia), things went way too quickly for me.

On the other hand, I just really wished that there had been a better editor or a longer editing process. Especially for moments like when two consecutive sentences both start with “Suddenly, …” – and neither of the suddenlies was actually warranted. And on a purely formal level, there were breaks, empty lines, missing from my ebook that would have been really necessary to make the entire thing more readable.

Plus, there were way too many clichés than was healthy for the book. The “francophilia as personality” was annoying, but okay. It was Colin who really got to me, though: he was the stereotype of a gay best friend that every straight woman who has never actually talked to a queer person loves to imagine. I wanted to scream every time he showed up. Not that he wasn’t likable per se, but it was unbearable.

The ending was… I see what Bell tried to do and I do appreciate the intention, but it came absolutely out of nowhere and didn’t ring true to me at all. It’s a fitting ending for a novel that remains bumpy.

Summarizing: it’s a book that felt aggravating most of the time to me. At its best moments, it got a “you tried” star.