High School ; Hard Cover, Romance - Sweet ; Highly Recommended

The Do-Over

The Do-Over by Lynn Painter is sure to be popular with hopeless romantics everywhere as they read sixteen-year-old Emilie Hornby’s experience of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, reoccuring Valentine’s Day—think of the movie Groundhog’s Day here. She tries everything she can think of to make the day perfect instead of horrible, but she can’t seem to prevent the unfortunate events of the day. Because of this, she decides to change it to a Day of No Consequences (DONC) with Nick Stark, the person she keeps running into. On this day she does whatever she wants because she will wake up at the beginning of Valentine’s Day again, except when she finally wakes up on February 15th and all of the consequences of her decisions from the previous day must now be faced. I enjoyed the confessions at the beginning of each chapter as they gave the readers more background on Emilie without taking up too much of the book. I also love the Taylor Swift references throughout the novel and in the playlist. The concept of reliving the same day is one I have read in books before, but I enjoyed this one a lot more because Emilie was doing different things in an attempt to produce a different outcome, so the days were never exactly the same. I disliked that after the DONC Emilie woke up on the 15th, I found it predictable and I was not looking forward to reading about her getting in trouble. I was also disappointed that she never told Nick that she was reliving Valentine’s Day. This romantic twist on Groundhog Day is lighthearted enough to be fluffy with just the right amount of emotion to make it seem real. General fiction readers may enjoy the adventure and drama presented in the story with the DONC and Emilie’s family problems. While romance lovers will get butterflies from the friendship between Nick and Emilie— he is very grumpy and she is very sunshine. This novel is the book version of a rom-com and Lynn Painter has not failed me yet with her fluffy reads. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested.