Avoiding Commitment (Avoiding, #1)

by K.A. Linde

[Ashley]

booknook — Young Adult book reviews

I wanted to love Avoiding Commitment, and I think I expected to love it because of all the rave reviews. Unfortunately, I hated it.

Oddly enough, I started out enjoying the book. I expected some incredible romance, a bit of drama, maybe a bit of cheating—but if done well, I knew I could handle it. What I got was:

* Lexi cheating on her boyfriends to be with Jack.
* Jack cheating on his girlfriends to be with Lexi.
* A book that spans six years. Six fucking years. Seriously, this book was way too long.
* More cheating.
* Horrible breakups because of said cheating.
* Flashbacks that show all the times Lexi got hurt by Jack.
* Then Jack cheats on Lexi and she can't believe it. So it's okay for her to cheat on her boyfriends but heaven forbid it happens to her?
* etc. etc.

Most of my problems with this book just boil down to the fact that Jack is a complete and utter jackass with no respect for relationships (hence the book title), and Lexi stupidly thinking that Jack truly loves her and wants to commit to being in a relationship with her. Jack continuously hurts her and disappoints her over the span of six years, but she still doesn't realize that he's a jackass. He won't commit to her. He'll cheat on her. She'll always be the "other woman." But she doesn't understand that, and keeps throwing herself into his arms anyway, and crying when he disappoints her. So at the end of the day, I just had no sympathy for her. She brought it all on herself.

Lexi keeps saying she's in love with Jack, but my question is: why? All we learn about Jack is:

He's hot.

He's a douche.

So why does she love him? All I see in their relationship is lust. Anytime Lexi is within two feet of him, all she can think is "sex, sex, sex. Please, fuck me now, even if I have a boyfriend." Honey, that's lust—not love. This book had no romance in it at all—it was just pure sex. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, if Lexi weren't running around saying that she loved Jack and wanted a relationship with him. And Jack was just ridiculous. He fed her lies and false hopes and manipulated her and then disappointed her every time. And whenever he was dating another woman and cheating on that woman to be with Lexi, he would get furious whenever Lexi kissed someone else "on the side." But it was perfectly okay for him to be dating and fucking another woman? Hypocrisy, much? But, the worst part was definitely at the end. Jack is dating Bekah, but tells Lexi that he really wants to be with her. Jack tells Lexi that she's the one he truly wants and that they'll figure everything out. Hours later, Jack and Lexi have sex. The next day, she finds out that Jack had just proposed to Bekah. Yeah, so much for that. He literally just use Lexi for a quick fuck, as far as I'm concerned. No girl should want to be in a relationship with a guy like that.

And the cheating in this book was just ridiculous. Some authors can get me to 'accept' horrible things. For example, take Captive in the Dark. That book is about a man who kidnaps a woman to train her to be a sex slave. That's horrible. That's disgusting. That's completely unthinkable. But the author masterfully makes me fall in love with the book and the story and the whole thing. So the fact that Avoiding Commitment is all about cheating (which I despise), doesn't automatically make me hate the book. The problem is that the author didn't convince me that it made sense. She didn't pull me in or make me fall in love with the story or the relationship enough to make me overlook the horrible acts of cheating. So instead, I just rolled my eyes every time it happened.

The bottom line is that this book was insanely long, very frustrating, and not satisfying. Lexi is absolutely ridiculous, naïve, and had an incredible ability to not learn from her mistakes. I never would have thought that a "smart" law student could make the same mistakes so many times, especially when she has like 5 people at any given time telling her how ridiculous she's being.

I did think it was clever how the author swapped between two time periods: present day, and the past but slowly brought the past forward back up to match with present day. But that interesting way of presenting the book wasn't enough to make up for the annoying main character and ultimately frustrating story. I almost didn't even finish the book because I just felt like it was going nowhere, and even the end was just Lexi finally realizing what EVERY CHARACTER had been screaming at her from page one. Towards the end I was doing a lot of hair pulling and skimming, just forcing myself to finish the book. I almost feel like I don't understand the point of the book. The problem was that as a reader, I knew what the problem was. I knew that Jack was an asshole that she should stay away from. But it takes Lexi the entire book to even realize that. So I feel like I just spent 400+ pages waiting for Lexi to catch up to me. I never felt like I was on the same page as her. I couldn't relate to her or sympathize her. I honestly looked down at her for acting childish. And when the book ended, I was just like "FINALLY, YOU'VE CAUGHT UP! WE CAN ALL GO HOME NOW!"