Actual Rating: 3
*Thank you to Netgalley, the publishers, and the author for a free e-copy in exchange for an honest review.*
Actual Rating: 3
The premise for this caught my eye right away, reminding me of Love, Rosie, but much funnier.
Hate Mail uses a dual perspective format to follow two characters: Luca and Naomi. Fifth-grade Naomi is really excited to have a pen pal, but her dreams are dashed when her assigned partner, Luca, is less than kind. Luca, meanwhile, doesn’t want to do this stupid pen pal thing, so he writes exactly that, hoping his pen pal will get offended and stop writing him. Instead, Naomi writes back, equally scathing. And thus begins their lifelong correspondence, years of handwritten letters that are half insulting, and half actual life updates. And then Luca abruptly stops writing and Naomi’s new letters get returned, telling her that Luca has moved — this time without telling her his new address. Life goes on, and so does Naomi, who now works as a meteorologist/weatherwoman. When she starts getting to know her handsome upstairs neighbor, she realizes that this could be something real…and then she gets an envelope.
The plot is overall a really fun and light-hearted one, and pretty expected; there’s a twist that might not seem like a twist if you already know it’s coming, which I definitely did. However, it did require some suspension of disbelief on my part. Yeah, I didn’t really expect to say that about a book that’s a very simple contemporary romance, but this is what I mean: while the ending is pretty predictable, the way we got there was kind of outlandish. As long as you don’t expect some very profound backstory, you’ll be fine and get a good laugh out of it.
Now, the characters. They’re okay. The letters between young Naomi and Luca are very endearing and reading their silly insults put a smile on my face.
On the other hand, I really wanted their adult versions to deviate from the goofiness and be more serious; they certainly did in the sense that they weren’t rude to each other anymore, but not in the sense that I felt their relationship was emotionally deep. I couldn’t really connect with them. The romance felt very surface level, like seeing two people see each other in a coffee shop and exchange phone numbers. It’s realistic, but it’s just not very interesting.
The side characters, are typical “friends” that you see in chick lits; Naomi’s friend is a little too pushy for my liking, but she does the job as a helper of plot development.
Overall, I think this was a fun read — like most books in this genre it’s really easy to sit down and read through it in one go. It’s not really memorable or one of my favorites but anyone who reads this will have fun.
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