TOUR / REVIEW: The Shortest Distance Between Love & Hate by Sandy Hall / magical reads

**I received an ARC for this tour. These are my honest opinions, and in no way was I compensated for this review.**

The Shortest Distance Between Love and Hate by Sandy Hall

Release Date: July 9, 2019

My Rating: 3 stars

Summary: A teen girl starting at a new school is torn between long-held loyalties and a bright new love.

Paisley is really looking forward to college. She is ready to take charge of her destiny and embrace some new experiences! Finding a hot guy to make out with at her first ever college party seems like a great start . . . until her best friend informs her that mystery guy is actually Carter Schmitt, Paisley's sworn enemy who basically ruined their lives in middle school.

So much for new people and exciting new experiences. Oh well. Paisley will just pretend he doesn't exist. Of course that would be easier if Carter, AKA her super-hot-sworn-enemy, hadn't ended up in three of her classes AND the same work study. Is it too late to rethink this college thing?

I'm so excited to be a part of the blog tour for The Shortest Distance Between Love & Hate! Today, my stop includes my review. Don't forget to check out the rest of the tour, full schedule and a giveaway below!

Making out with you was basically the biggest mistake I have ever made. But the universe is obviously forcing us to be together at every turn. I really hope that we can grow past it and pretend to be strangers who just happen to work together and see each other all the time. We don't have to be friends.

The Shortest Distance Between Love & Hate caught my attention because it's a college-set YA, which is honestly something we need more of. After reading it, I felt that it was fairly realistic for someone's freshman year.

The characters were very well-developed! Both Paisley and Carter are going through their own things, and their points of view read differently. I liked being in both of their heads and meeting their respective friends. The side characters were also fairly developed, namely Henry.

The romance was actually pretty cute! This is marketed as a hate-to-love (as in, the title), but honestly, I wouldn't really say that. Is it hate-to-love if the hate is only one-sided? (More on that later.) When they finally got together though, I thought they were really cute together.

Unfortunately, I only really got into the book halfway through the book once the pranks were over because Paisley's pranks went wayyy too far. Getting Carter a strike on his record at work? Granted it was his first one, but it's obviously a work study job and you don't mess with someone's financial aid. She also does something to slightly sabotage his grade, but she later fixes it. No matter how many amends Paisley makes later though, I found myself horrified by her actions in the moment.

I honestly felt like the author spent more time ensuring that Carter's reasons for bullying Henry in middle school were reasonable rather than focusing on developing Paisley in any way. She honestly read like a typical white girl who doesn't care about the consequences of her actions. And she gets away with it all! She does eventually regret all her pranks, but again, at the very end of the book. It's just so difficult to read her knowing she's in the wrong yet standing her ground just because she gets defensive for no reason. Also, her justification for ruining Carter's life is so weak, considering Henry kept telling her to stop.

I did think the writing was enjoyable otherwise. I've never been able to get through any of this author's other books, personally, but I liked this one enough to finish it.

The Shortest Distance Between Love & Hate is a good read, one that'll have you laughing out loud at moments. The two main characters have good chemistry, and the writing is nice. I wouldn't necessarily call it a hate-to-love book, but it is a YA contemporary set in college, so there's that.

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About the Author: I’m a teen librarian from New Jersey where I was born and raised. I have a BA in Communication and a Master of Library and Information Science from Rutgers University. When I’m not writing, or teen librarian-ing, I enjoy reading, slot machines, marathoning TV shows, and long scrolls through Tumblr. A LITTLE SOMETHING DIFFERENT is my first novel.

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