Oh heyyyy everyone, and happy Thanksgiving! Yes, yes, I accidentally hiatused again, and it was because of darn Day Job again. But not to worry – my travels are completed for now, so I’ll be back at blogging regularly again. Which is good, because I love it and missed it! And after that? I’ll jump back on the bookstagram train, because that was fun as well and I’ve missed that too. Anyway! I was supposed to post this review earlier this week as part of the blog tour, but then, as I was finishing up the book, I realized… that I really didn’t like it. So I decided to hold off until later on so I could be totally honest with y’all. And here we are!
So, the premise of this one. It’s a doozy, so prepare yourself.
In Saving It, Josh Evans wants to lose his virginity, so he asks his best friend Eden Sumner to help him. She comes up with a list of girls that he should try to get with, he steadily goes through the list and realizes that he’s actually in love with Eden, and she’s also in love with him.
That’s it. You can probably guess how I feel about this, but I’ll tell you anyway. But first, like always…
3 Things I Loved
- The use of Snapchat. I finally kind of get what the youths are doing these days.
- Josh and Eden’s friends. The truest of any friends, they always have Josh and Eden’s backs.
- Josh and Eden’s friendship. Despite my feelings about the premise of the book, I did enjoy Josh and Eden’s friendship in the early parts of the book. As it got more awkward between them, it felt pretty darn real, and I was there for it.
Dislikes/Problematic Content
Well. Let’s start with the premise. Josh is a high school senior who feels that he needs to lose his virginity in order to fit in in the locker room and go off to college. He’s so desperate to lose it that he ropes his best friend Eden into helping him find a girl. Like. ?????????? I have so many questions and I hate all the answers. From the top:
- Why is it that this book even got published? A guy losing his virginity may be a right of passage, but that doesn’t mean it has to be handled in this way. All that locker room nonsense sounds super Trumpian. That’s not an excuse for anything, and it’s bullshit, to be quite honest. Having sex for the first time is something that should be done when that particular person feels it is right for themselves. It’s dumb to have a whole book premise on the losing of one’s virginity in the first place. So I was already turned off.
- Why in the world would Josh ask his female best friend to help him? I don’t want to even get into the binary gender role thing happening in this book, not to mention how everyone is super straight. So yeah. Anyway. Him asking Eden to help? Messed up.
- WHY DOES HE NEED HELP FINDING A GIRL TO DATE/SCREW WHEN HE IS SUPPOSEDLY SUPER POPULAR????? I feel this stands on its own.
And those are just the problems with the book’s premise! That doesn’t get into the book itself, where the writing was absolutely terrible. There was so much exposition that I could hardly get through some passages. It was painful. Reading this book pained me. And yet… the will they/won’t they required that I finish the book. Dag nabbit.
Rating
A reminder of the rating scale:
- Red = DNF, I hated everything
- Orange = Ugh, no thank you
- Yellow = I mean, I’ve read worse, but there were problems
- Green = This was good!
- Blue = Oh my gosh, I loved this book!
- Purple = This is the unicorn of books and I will be rereading it until the binding falls apart and EVERYONE should be reading it!
So uh. Sorry y’all. This isn’t going to be pretty. I’m going to give Saving It an ORANGE rating. There was just… too much going on that I absolutely hated, the premise most of all. So yeah. Yikes.
Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. I apologize if my review was a bit… too honest this time.
Has anyone else read this one? Let me know what you think!
Happy reading!
-A.
Snark & Squee 
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