It has been said that boys and girls can never be ‘just’ friends, and until Nathan Penn barged into my life, I thought it was complete and utter nonsense. But one night changed everything, and what I thought was the defining moment in our friendship turned out to be more than either of us were ready for.
When my boss tasks me with writing the University’s new sex advice column, Dear Delilah, I make it quite clear that I’m the least qualified person for the job – my experience is limited to one sexual encounter that taught me about love and loss all at once.
So what makes me say ‘yes’?
Simple.
A distraction.
Something to take my mind off Nathan.
But once I start, I find myself wanting to be the voice of the girl who’s to afraid to ask for advice, the girl who wants to own her sexuality but doesn’t know how. Sounds easy enough.
Except it isn’t.
It’s complicated, and messy and awkward, and when Nathan offers to help, I’m caught between a rock and his hard place. Literally.
It’s only when my identity is threatened that I realize I might be in over my head. With all of it.
My Review
*Thanks again to the publisher for sending me an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*
When I first read the synopsis of ‘Dear Delilah’, I was excited for this book and was hoping it would be a quick read that would allow me to forget about my everyday stress for a bit. But instead, I ended up having to force myself to even finish this book because I unfortunately didn’t enjoy it at all.
‘Dear Delilah’ is a book about Savannah, a college girl who is interning at the college’s newspaper. One day she is asked to take over the newspaper’s sex advice column and even though she doesn’t have a lot of experience when it comes to sex, she says yes. But why? Because she needs a distraction from an incident with her male best friend that took place a couple of weeks prior to the start of this book.
Like I said, I liked the synopsis and thought it would be one of those new adult reads that you just fly through and that allow you to relax for a bit. But ‘Dear Delilah’ was absolutely boring and if I hadn’t received an ARC of this book, I would’ve definitely DNFd it.
The book starts a couple of weeks after something has happened between Savannah and her (ex) best friend Nathan that made them stop talking to each other. While I’m usually someone who prefers it if the author doesn’t straight out tells you what exactly happened and gives you a chance to figure it out yourself, I would’ve preferred it if the author had just been a little more straightforward this time because it took me the first quarter of the book, to even understand what had caused their falling-out. There were two or three flashbacks that were supposed to tell you how everything had gone down, but I felt like I had no background information that I might’ve needed to even understand how they had suddenly gone from being friends to sleeping with each other, and what Savannah’s problem was.
Another thing that bothered me a little was the female main character herself. While Nathan was your typical new adult male main character that you see in a lot of books similar to this one, Savannah acted like a 14-year-old even though she was already in college. She was embarrassed when anyone even mentioned the word ‘sex’ and could barely even talk about it to anyone. She wasn’t a virgin when the book started and later on you even find out that she has pierced nipples which made her entire behavior seem very unrealistic. It was cringy and made me roll my eyes quite a lot.
Furthermore, I also thought the main subject of this book would be the sex column Savannah took over which was called ‘Dear Delilah’, just like this novel. But instead she didn’t start writing the column until the second half of the book which really disappointed me.
There was one more thing that bothered me, but won’t influence my rating, which were the spelling mistakes in this book. You can always find spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in ARCs because they’re uncorrected proofs which is totally fine. But I genuinely felt like no editor had even looked at this book before. It was not only full of spelling mistakes that could’ve easily been corrected by the spell checker on your computer, but there were also a couple of things regarding the content that just didn’t make sense. Like him saying that they hadn’t had sex since their first date even though they’d just had sex again a couple of pages before he said that which was just one of the textual errors that kind of spoiled the reading experience for me. But like I said, I didn’t let this influence my rating because I really hope this will be different in the finished copy of the book.
All in all, I just absolutely didn’t like this book. It was poorly written and I didn’t feel like I had any connection with the characters which is why I also didn’t really enjoy their ‘love story’. I still think you can enjoy the finished copy of this book if you really like college romances, but it just wasn’t my cup of tea which is why I unfortunately can’t give ‘Dear Delilah’ more than 1 out of 5 stars.
Have you already read ‘Dear Delilah’ and did you like it?
