“A relationship isn’t a snapshot. (…) It’s a journey.”
Genre: Romance, Comedy
Actual rating: 4 stars
Content Warnings: Discusses divorce and deals with abandonment issues, but there aren’t really any other content warnings that I can think of.
“The Party Crasher” follows Effie, a (currently unemployed) event planner, as she crashes her family home’s “house cooling” party. Effie’s father and stepmother Mimi were the ones who raised her but now, after Effie and her siblings grow up and move away from home, they get a divorce. This has left Effie to question if everything she lived in her childhood was real because she really could’ve sworn they were a happy couple. A few years later, in comes Krista, Effie’s father’s gold-digging girlfriend. As Effie’s family’s quirky home is finally sold, Krista organizes a house cooling party and “forgets” to invite Effie. Hurt, but on a mission to rescue one of her childhood toys, Effie sets out to attend the party anyway, without anyone seeing her there. In a series of unfortunate (and comedic) events, Effie ends up not going unnoticed and has to resort to the help of her siblings and even an ex-boyfriend. In this heartwarming novel, Sophie Kinsella gives us the quirkiest of quirky families.
This has been the funniest romantic novel for me. I see so many books cataloged under romantic comedy when they’re really just romances without a huge tragedy, but wow, that was not the case with “The Party Crasher”. This book made me cringe and feel secondhand embarrassment and giggle and downright laugh at times. Effie, the main character, was going through a rollercoaster of emotions, and so was I.
I would say this was a relatively PG romance, but it was still cute and heartwarming in all the moments that mattered. I liked the characters, even the hatable ones, and I liked how fast-paced this book was, there were no dull moments.
I would recommend this book to young adults looking for a funny, light, romantic story to get out of their heads. This book is enthralling and entertaining, it’ll help you forget everything in the real world for a few hours.
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andrea's galley 