City Love Blog Tour: Review + Giveaway

City Love by Susan Colasanti

Release Date: April 21, 2015
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Series: City Love, Book 1
Rated: YA 15+
Format: eGalley
Source: Edelweiss
Buy: Amazon ● The Book Depository ● B&N ● iTunes ● Kobo
Goodreads ● Website

Sadie, Darcy, and Rosanna are living together in New York City the summer before their freshman year of college begins. With no parents, no rules, and an entire city to explore, these three girls are on the verge of the best summer of their lives.

Sadie is a native New Yorker. She is hopeful, romantic, and an eternal optimist who is ready to find her soul mate. Then she meets her dream boy: cute, funny, and quirky in all the right ways. The chemistry between them is unreal. Could he be the one?

Darcy is a free spirit from SoCal with rebellious tendencies and unlimited financial resources. Moving to New York City is just another adventure for her. Darcy wants this summer to be all about boy adventures—nothing serious. But how much fun is too much?

Rosanna leaves Chicago for NYC so she can put her past behind her and reinvent herself. The only thing standing in her way is the grand total of seventy-three cents she has saved. Then she meets a guy who wants to show her the glamorous side of New York—a side that she would never get to experience on her own. If Rosanna doesn't resist, she may find herself in city love.

Told from alternating points of view, City Love captures the moments in each girl's life when everything is thrilling, amazing, and terrifying all at once . . . in a way it will never be again.

I’ve heard a ton about Susane Colasanti’s contemporary books and I’ve been DYING to get my hands on one to read. I was lucky when City Love became available as an eGalley on Edelweiss, and I finally got the chance to read it as a part of this blog tour. I didn’t realise that this was actually sort of more “new adult” than “young adult” in the sense that it’s about girls going to college and their experiences there. However, the voices of these girls really seem more younger than I thought they would be, so it does resonate with a young adult voice. Anyway, after finishing City Love I had a lot of thoughts about what I’d just read, some good, some (unfortunately) not-so-great, but on the whole it was an enjoyable read.

I liked that the story focuses on three girls, and the perspectives alternate. Each girl is really different from the other. Sadie is the local who seems to have a connection with every place in the area they live in. Rosanna is the nervous, broke girl from Chicago, who has a dark past. Darcy is the blunt, rich Californian ready to blaze a trail of men with a fresh start in New York. We have the poor, rich and middle-income, as well as the confident, shy and outgoing. I think I enjoyed Sadie’s story the most, but it was Rosanna’s that intrigued me. Darcy’s, to be honest, seemed kinda pointless. Definitely a ton of interesting things happen in the stories, but sometimes it just seemed that the plot was going nowhere and that some of the scenes were filler. The end kind of made up for that though because it revealed the pasts that Sadie and Rosanna hide from their group. Darcy’s backstory becomes pretty evident from the start so there’s seriously not much that comes up, and even with the end of her story in this book, it’s nothing too major. Sadie’s story ended with a complete twist, and Rosanna’s left me kind of unsatisfied. We learned about her past and it was kinda shrugged off nonchalantly, which I think is kinda sad because I wish it was explored more.

The boys in this story were great, but I wish they could have been a bit more intriguing. I LOVE Jude–he’s probably the best guy out of all three stories. Austin was great at the start, and the flirting scenes with him were absolutely adorable, but something about him seemed a little too cookie-cutter-perfect (all is not as it seems!). Rosanna’s boy D, like her story, really intrigued me. I feel like we didn’t get a whole picture of him and it just seemed too strange a romance to actually be true, but nothing really came up at the end like I’d hoped. I honestly thought there was going to be more with the twist (trust me, I had theories about Austin, D and Jude) but it wasn’t what I’d expected at all.

What I loved about this story was that you get a really good picture of New York with Colasanti’s writing. I’ve been to New York a few times, and it was only the last time I went that I actually got to explore the city with my friends (not my family) and use the subway. There were so many interesting tidbits about the various places in the city, and the restaurants and cafés really made me quite hungry whilst reading the book, but best part about it was that the descriptions of buildings and places and people really take you there, to New York City.

While I had some tiny problems with the story, I enjoyed City Love. Susane Colasanti’s latest contemporary sparks the romantic in me and I find myself dreaming of city love. I look forward to the sequel, which I’m sure will feature more boys, more love and more drama, as well as to reading more of Colasanti’s books.

If you like this, try...

• The Summer Invitation by Charlotte Silver ● Goodreads
• Bright Young Things by Anna Godbersen ● Goodreads

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SUSANE COLASANTI

Susane Colasanti is the bestselling author of When It Happens, Take Me There, Waiting for You, Something Like Fate, So Much Closer, Keep Holding On, All I Need, and Now and Forever. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree from New York University. Before becoming a full-time author in 2007, Susane was a high school science teacher for ten years. She lives in New York City.

Website ● Goodreads ● Blog ● Twitter ● Facebook ● Tumblr ● Instagram ● YouTube ● Google+

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Read an EXCERPT of City Love HERE!

Take the City Love Quiz HERE and find out which character you are!

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And now... time for a giveaway!

Enter to win:
One (1) Finished copy of City Love by Susane Colasanti!

US Only
Prize will be sent from the Publishing House.

Enter via the rafflecopter below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway
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Thank you so much to FFBC Blog Tours for having me along!

Click on the button above or on the tour banner at the top of the post to follow the rest of the tour!