Sweet is a companion novel to Easy and Breakable and the focus is switched to Boyce and Pearl, high school friends of Lucas. It delves a lot into their history, how they’d been friends since they were little and how this friendship developed into something more after they graduated high school.
I did enjoy Sweet. It took a couple of chapters to get going, but once it did I stayed up until 2am. I only put it down when I fell asleep in the middle of a sentence and my Kindle landed on my forehead. I finished it off this morning while I was supposed to be ironing. So yeah, it was a fairly compelling read.
I liked Boyce and Pearl as characters. Outwardly they are so very different, but they just seemed to gel really well when they were together. They’d both had stuff to deal with while they were growing up and they came from such wildly different backgrounds that it was really lovely to see how their feelings for each other overcame the obstacles in their paths. I have to say, I didn’t like them as much as I liked Lucas and Jacqueline in the previous two books. Lucas was a lot moodier and tortured than Boyce (plus: piercings and tats - yum!) and although Pearl was a good, strong character, she was a lot weepier than Jacqueline. Happy tears, sad tears - the girl cries a *lot*.
I’ve just re-read what I wrote and I realised I’m making it sound like I didn’t like Boyce and Pearl. I really did, but because I liked Jacqueline and Lucas (okay, mostly Lucas) so much, everyone else is going to pale in comparison. It probably didn’t help that I have a massive book-crush on Lucas and, because I’m weird, I basically inserted myself into Jacqueline’s persona. It’s something I’m working on with my therapist.
Anyhoo ... let’s move onto the plot. The story is told from the dual POV of Boyce and Pearl and it not only deals with real-time plot but also has plenty of flashbacks. This could have gone seriously wrong and ended up like a massive plate of plot-spaghetti, but the author skilfully manages to keep everything straight and the plot reveals itself gradually whilst filling in the details of Boyce and Pearl’s friendship.
I think I read an interview or something where the author said she really loves Happy Ever Afters, and this really shows in Sweet. Like, EVERYONE gets a Happy Ever After in this book!
Sweet is a standalone and you don’t have to have read Easy or Breakable to enjoy it. Tammara Webber’s writing is so good and she’s got such a great ear for dialogue that I’m interested to see if she’s going to write any more books in this series (my money’s on Brittney Loper).
4 stars