Book Review: The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith

Book: The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith
Genre: Contemporary YA
Rating: ★★★☆☆
For: Fun
From: bought cheap for my Kindle

I've been really looking forward to getting to this one. Everyone seemed to love it so much! So I've been saving it for my trip and it was up first on my Kindle reading list.

However, it turned out to be not quite what I expected. I expected a light fluffy romance, something totally just for fun. However, the kids in this story have ISSUES! One of them is going to London (which I found fun as I was also flying over the ocean at the time of reading!) to her dad's wedding, and she is so not happy about it. She is coming to grips with him getting remarried and much of the book is her flashing back to their relationship over the years.

While at the airport, she meets a dude, a British boy who has been living in the US and he going back to London to, what she assumes is also a wedding, however we find out later that was not quite right. Anyway. They bond on the flight and talk and have a deep connection which ends up helping them both get through what they are facing.

So, yes, in actuality the plot is very very simple, as I expected, but it was not very much light and fluffy, and it was much more about the parental relationships than it was about the blooming romance. So the title is a bit misleading, don't you think?

But it was a fun, quick read, which is what I truly wanted for my first vacation read.

Bottom line: A good story, but not a the light fluffy romance one might expect.

Other Reviews:

Hadley and Oliver’s love story is one readers will swoon over and one I know I’m still thinking about days after completing my reading. From There's a Book

This was an easy to love story, filled with emotion and well-rounded characters. From One Literature Nut

It's a pretty basic and predictable story overall, but it was extremely cute and made me smile and tear up plenty of times. From The Broke and the Bookish

While I’m not sure if there was enough said or enough time for Hadley and her father’s fences to be completely mended, I found the brief time I spent with Statistical incredibly sweet and memorable. From Book Harbinger

The Epic European Trip

As you may or may not know, I've just returned from a three week trip to Europe with the whole family! A couple of years ago we drove across the country and called it The Big Trip. Well, this latest trip we  are now calling The Epic Trip! My daughter went to Spain in April for a study abroad program, and so we decided when she was done we would pick her up and travel around with her a bit before all coming back to real life.

So that's what we did! It was crazy, and fun, and stressful, and exhausting and thrilling and.... all of it. We saw a bit of Madrid, then three days in Barcelona, four days in San Sebastian (we have a friend there that we visited), six days in Paris and then four more days in London. Whew! It flew by much much too fast and feels all like a blur now. But hopefully we created a some memories and showed our kids a little bit of the world.

We tried a new thing this trip and that was to rent and stay in local apartments instead of hotels. We used a website many of you have probably heard of, but it was all new to us... airbnb.com. Anyway, this made for quite the different experience, and it was so fun! Much more affordable for our big(ish) family than hotels, and fun to be right in the local neighborhood, shopping for breakfast groceries at the local market, coming home at night with the local people. Awesome. There were, however, some things I missed (not necessarily from hotels, but just from home) which I'll post about later, just because I find those things to be quite interesting.

Anyway, here's a few (but probably too many!) pictures of the adventure and some of the places we stayed:

This is just after we meet up with the daughter who had been in Spain for 6 weeks already.

We rode a lot of trains. I loved it.
(Except for the metros/tubes, I got really sick of those!)

Wading in the Mediterranean Sea in Barcelona.

A view of the famous beach in San Sebastian

With our friend Ane, in San Sebastian

Walking walking walking, always walking!

The view out our balcony window in Madrid.

The view down the street where we stayed in Barcelona.

Paris as seen from from the towers of Notre Dame

The Eiffel Tower is awesome at night.

A cool sun shot of the London Eye

And another cool sun shot of Big Ben

The house were we stayed in London, near Wimbledon

The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona

Just some of the stuff Ane's mom fed us

The family at Notre Dame

Love this shot of the Louvre Pyramid at sunset

The Tour Eiffel!

You all know what the Mona Lisa looks like,
but did you know what the crowd observing her looks like?
CRAZY!!

The beautiful gardens at Versailles.
So clean and pristine that my son thought it looked like a fake backdrop for a movie

The catacombs in Paris, where they've moved tons of skeletons form graveyards
and have done artwork with them.

More Eiffel Tower!
(A rare "whole family" picture.)

Sunset over Paris from the top of the tower.
(Wait, not the top! The second level. We didn't go to the top.)

Well anyway. I guess that gives a little feel of what I've been up to the last three weeks! It's good, sad and a bit weird to be home!

Monthly Reading Wrap Up for June 2013

Being on vacation when the month changed, I missed a timely monthly recap, and so even though we are a bit into July now, but I'd still like to list what I managed to read in June.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter: An Italian innkeeper meets an American movie star which changes both of their lives from that moment on.

Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers: Ismae finds herself at an assassin school and then is assigned to the court to protect the Princess.

Paris by Janelle McCullough: A beautifully photographed book about the different personalities of several Parisian neighborhoods.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman: A guy visits his childhood home and has a flashback to a very strange incident that happened when he was seven.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith: A girl going to her dad's wedding in London meets a guy going to his dad's funeral in London and they connect and have deep thoughts about their parents and relationships.

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi: A girl is on the run from a corrupt society that wants to use her unique power to do very bad things.

Rick Steves' Pocket Paris and Pocket London: Can I count these as books read this month? At least I would like to give them a plug. AWESOME little books! They were perfect for us to haul around these two cities and use as a reference guide and walking tour guides and guides through the museums. All the info you need for anything in these cities is compiled and condensed into these cute little, easy to carry books. I loved them and they did their job perfectly. Highly recommended! We love Rick Steves at this house!

Favorite of the month: Definitely Beautiful Ruins.

Plans for July:

• continue with some ebooks that have built up on the Kindle and are begging to be read (see list here.)
• re-read Edenbrooke for book club
• maybe continue with Hood which I started last month

And that's about it! My goals for the rest of this month will be very very modest!

How's the reading this summer going for all of you?

Top Ten Tuesday: Best and Worst Movies!

And now I give you the best and worst movie adaptations. Well, at least the ones that came to mind at the moment.

The BEST:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird: Gregory Peck totally nailed that Atticus!

2. The Lord of the Rings... of course.

3. Holes is one of my all time favorite books to movies.

4. Pride and Prejudice... one that I'm sure everyone will be listing. (The BBC one of course.)

5. Harry Potter... almost all of them. I think they did an amazing job with this endeavor.

The WORST:

1. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) Every thing was all wrong!! And it took out too many events and it added events that had nothing to do with the book.

2. Eragon: All wrong again. Just bad bad bad. Somehow, the movie totally lost the emotion of the book. How can they do that?

3. Ella Enchanted: It wasn't a bad movie, but it pretty much had nothing to do with the book, you know.

Hmmm... I'm sure there's many more bad ones, but that's all I can think of at the moment!


Agree or disagree? Check out everyone's lists at The Broke and the Bookish!

Happy 4th!

To wish you a Happy 4th here in the US I'm sharing one of my favorite songs! It's actually a Civil War song and is set to Civil War images, but still. I think it'll work for today too.




What patriotic song really moves you?

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Intimidating Books

Ah, there are so many scary books out there! Scary, as in, too hard, too long, too controversial, too buzzed about, too... I don't know... many many things!

Here are few that are on my list:

1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larrson
4. Clarissa by Samual Richardson
5. The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer
6. The Wings of a Dove by Henry James
7. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
8. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
9. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
10. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (though I have read half!)

What books scare you a bit? Link on up over The Broke and the Bookish!

Mini Bloggiesta This Month!

Just a heads up for all you Bloggiesta people!

We'll be having our second "MINI" Bloggiesta this month on July 20 and 21... a Saturday and Sunday. The difference between a mini event and main event, besides the obvious that it's just two days long instead of three, is that we will have fewer mini challenges, fewer Twitter chats, and that it's just a bit more easy going and relaxed.

Basically, it's an in between event where you can make a to do list, work on your blog and chat a bit with others doing the same, just like in a main Bloggiesta, but without as much hoopla about it.

Make sense?

I hope you join us! Mark you calenders!

And be sure to check out the website and our new Facebook page for updates.