Review: After Hello

Title After Hello
By Lisa Mangum
Genre YA contemporary romance
Rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Synopsis
Sara is spending the day in New York while her dad attends a business meeting. When she captures a picture of Sam leaving a bookstore there's just something about him that makes her follow him. Thus starts their adventurous day together as they both come to terms with their pasts.

First Sentence
I shouldn't have noticed him.

I've only read the first book of Lisa Mangum's Hourglass series and was not impressed. It came so closely after twilight I felt like it was too closely related...especially the whole romantic part, but when I stumbled upon this one at a thrift store and fell in love with the cover I decided to give it a go. I thought maybe paranormal romance wasn't Mangum's thing and a contemporary romance would be better.  I think I was right.

While some people might find bits and pieces of this story unbelievable, I only found one thing that had me raising an unbelieving eyebrow. Most of the other things were easy for me to suspend my belief and go along with the story.

I liked following the characters through their quest but couldn't quite connect to them.I felt like maybe the things that happened to them in their pasts was supposed to make me have sympathy for them and I sort of felt like the author only threw their pasts in to manipulate us.

But the overall story was cute and easy to read. If I think too long and hard about it I could probably tear this one apart but if this book had one thing going for it, it was that it didn't make me want to dislike it.

The back cover of this book has a small, simple blurb saying, "What if the first day of your relationship was the only day you had?".  I was worried the author would fall into peer pressure and not stick true to that blurb, but she did. Phew!

Should you read it
I think if you read Mangum's other books and disliked them you need to give this one a go. It's different and a much better read.