Surviving Adam Meade
Shannon Klare
Publisher: Swoon Reads
Year Released: 2018
Date Read: October 5, 2018
Genre: Romance, Contemporary, Young Adult, Slightly Sporty
Grade: C+/ 3.8
“Adam’s eyes narrowed. ‘Wow. Sure there isn’t a pair of ball on you?’
‘Sure there’s a pair of balls on you?'”
-Shannon Klare
After her dad gets a new job coaching a high school football team, Claire Collins is forced to move to a new town her senior year. Claire just wants to hurry up and finish school, and go to college. She doesn’t want to make any new friends or be around her father’s new football team. The chances of all of that happening for her quickly go down hill when Adam Meade, the school’s star football player, treats her as if she’s nothing and continues to do so. Claire just wanted to get through her year, but once Adam makes her a target of his game, she finds it impossible to do so.
Contemporary’s are like my guilty pleasure, except I don’t really feel any guilt for liking them because they aren’t bad. They are the gushy cute romances I like to read when I need to take a break from intense action fantasy series. I’m rating this book a three point eight because i can’t rate it the same as The Foxhole Court, or the To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before series, which I rated five stars and four star. To me those set the standards for my five and four stars for contemporary, so to me this was not as good as To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, so this had to fall below a four. Now, my standards of what a contemporary novel should be is probably different from other people. To me contemporary novels are usually my easy reads. I just want a good cute romance that isn’t a Nicholas Sparks dramatic romance. I want it to basically just be cute and adorable, with a reasonably good plot so it’s not too cheesy. That is exactly what surviving Adam Meade was. It was the cute, not too cheesy, enemy to in love story.
Pros
- Claire and Adam’s banter. Claire’s character was very clever and witty. She always had something to snap back at Adam, and Adam was the same way. Claire didn’t just banter playfully with Adam, but with her family also. She was funny to read. A lot of girl characters in contemporary novels are shy or quiet. Claire wasn’t. She spoke what she felt she needed to say and wasn’t afraid to say it. She didn’t shy away from Adam’s remarks or how he treated her, she challenged him on it.
- Adam was also very funny to read. He tended to be very honest, which made for a lot of great moments. Adam does fall into the cliche of the obnoxious football player character, but he doesn’t stick to that mold. He obnoxious feel starts to turn into just confidence in his actions and not doing so in a jerk like nature. I actually think Adam was a better written character than Claire. Adam seemed more real than Claire. I didn’t really see any faults in his character. The author lets you see that he has people he cares for and that he deeply cares for them and it makes him seem very real, where as Claire doesn’t have that same realness except for a somewhat selfish teen, which you could say is real in its own way. Adam, to me, took the spotlight in this book. He was incredibly charming and I loved him.
- Another part of the book I really enjoyed was the realness of your last year in high school. That feeling of trying to figure out your next step in life, and realizing that a part of your life you’ve always known is about to end. That you’re closing a chapter of your life, which sometimes means leaving people behind in that chapter. Closing any chapter of life can be hard and this book depicts it very well.
Cons
- Claire can get mad for literally no reason at all. She gets mad at Adam for him being realistic about there being a chance she might not be accepted into the college she wants. He wasn’t saying she was stupid, he was being realistic. Many people get turned down from the college of their dreams and she takes it as if he’s personally attacking her and saying that college is above her. He even apologizes for the chance that it came off that way and she still gets upset. She also sometimes does stupid things and acts like nothing is going happen from it, then gets sad when something does. She literally messes with someone’s property, and then gets sad when they get mad at her for it. I don’t know what she expected. I liked her character, but there was times I couldn’t help but think, “Girl, calm down and quit. Stop it.” I don’t want to say she is a brat, but she is a little. She’s a little selfish about the move, which is a little understandable since she was taken away from her friends her senior year. I can understand her being upset about moving, but there other times where she just gets annoying. She literally hides something from Adam, gets told that she needs to tell him, admit she needs to tell him, but doesn’t…. What? I don’t understand? I like Claire but there are times where she is too much of a teenager.
- There were parts that weren’t needed, and seemed to be basically filler. The author would put in a scene, just to contradict it with another scene a few paragraphs later. It made the first scene pointless.It didn’t help build character, or do anything for the plot, it was just filler that made no sense. I understand at times filler is needed, but when it contradicts itself or doesn’t affect the story then it’s harms you more than it helps you. There was also a introduction that was weird to me. “I’m Riley… Padar High School cheer captain and Luke Bryan fangirl.” I don’t know if it’s just me, but I have never heard someone introduce themselves like this unless it’s the first day of school and the teacher is making the class do a get to know me type of thing. I have never heard a person just do this themselves. Her saying she was the cheer captain was ok, but the fangirl part was weird to me. I’ve never had anyone introduce themselves to me like that before, or seen anyone introduce themselves to anyone like that. Maybe that’s just me though. I am socially awkward, so maybe?…
For what I read contemporary for, this book was good. It was something I didn’t have to focus hard on and it was overall enjoyable. I laughed, smiled at cute moments. Claire seemed bratty at times, but it’s clear it wasn’t because she thought she was better than everyone. It was more as if she didn’t know she was being bratty and based on what you see from her character, she would of probably felt bad if someone had pointed it out. Claire was a typical teenager who makes many mistakes and learns from that. I don’t think it’s too much of a fault in her character and doesn’t make the book awful. Teenagers are always know as hormonal brats so a lot of people write them as that, and some teenagers are like that, I’ve meet them, and avoided them. If Claire was a complete brat I wouldn’t have finished the book(there are a lot of books I stopped reading for that reason) Claire was dramatic, and going through a stressful time for a teenager. I thought the book was cute and if you like cute romances I think this wasn’t bad. It probably had some of the best banter I’ve read in contemporary. It didn’t seem forced. It seemed perfectly natural and fit perfectly.
Simplistic Reader 