Review: Finding It by Cora Carmack


Finding It
Cora Carmack
Series: Losing It, #3
Release Date: October 1st, 2013
Publisher: William Morrow
Rating: 4 stars
Word Rating: Angsty Goodness
Reviewed by: Kate

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Most girls would kill to spend months traveling around Europe after college graduation with no responsibility, no parents, and no-limit credit cards. Kelsey Summers is no exception. She's having the time of her life...or that's what she keeps telling herself.

It's a lonely business trying to find out who you are, especially when you're afraid you won't like what you discover. No amount of drinking or dancing can chase away Kelsey's loneliness, but maybe Jackson Hunt can. After a few chance meetings, he convinces her to take a journey of adventure instead of alcohol. With each new city and experience, Kelsey's mind becomes a little clearer and her heart a little less hers. Jackson helps her unravel her own dreams and desires. But the more she learns about herself, the more Kelsey realizes how little she knows about Jackson.

If I believed the stories I learned growing up, God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested.  I wonder if, like me, the eighth day was when he watched it all begin to unravel.

New Adult is a tough genre.  Almost every book that falls into it feels like a bit of a redheaded stepchild; too mature to be classified as Young Adult, but not written well enough to be considered Contemporary Romance.  Easy is a notable exception, as are The Sea of Tranquility, Unteachable, Sophie Jordan's upcoming Foreplay, and Samantha Young's On Dublin Street series. 

But the reigning queen of NA--the author who most consistently, time and again, writes sweet, sexy stories about lovely, complicated young women and men--is absolutely Cora Carmack.  And she's done it again with Finding It, an exciting, angsty story that follows Kelsey (friend of Bliss and Cade, protagonists of of Losing It and Faking it, respectively) on a backpacking trip through Europe.

When we meet Kelsey, the classic Poor Little Rich Girl (gorgeous, useless, and with a metric shit-ton of daddy's money to play with), she's two weeks into her laze across Eastern Europe.  She spends her time sleeping, drinking too much, and having sex with random dudes who don't speak English, and she isn't particularly fussed about any of it.  She is just generally an unlikeable, wounded waste of a meat puppet.  The night Kelsey meets Jackson, a gorgeous, ex-military enigma of a man, she's out at a club with her sexy, non-english-speaking friends.  She drinks too much and pukes in the street, then disgustingly tries to make out with Jackson when he walks her home.

***TIME OUT.  Cora Carmack, I'd like to take a moment to thank you for knowing that unbrushed teeth and puke breath are absolutely disgusting.  Why do authors forget this?  Why do they think that a quick rinse of the mouth with a swig of water is enough to get rid of bile?  IT ISN'T.  IT REALLY, REALLY ISN'T.  Time in.***

Kelsey and Jackson  begin to accidentally bump into each other around Budapest. Their relationship progresses slowly until suddenly it doesn't, and they find themselves thrust together on a train crossing the continent.  They travel from Hungary through Austria, bungee jumping and hiking until they hit a tiny, romantic town in Italy where they hunker down and pretend their fledgling romance isn't absolutely doomed. 

While the stuff between the two of them is great--it really, really is--and while I adore Jackson as a character, Kelsey is what makes this book shine for me.  She's hideously spoiled, but she knows it, and she understands how she is perceived, and while she wants desperately to grow, she doesn't know how to initiate that process.  Early in the novel, she encounters The Shoes on the Danube Promenade, and her bullshit worries and entitlement hit her pretty hard.  As Kelsey puts it,

I felt like such a failure.  Every shoe before me represented a dream that would never be lived, a life that would never be loved.  I'd never faced that kind of oppression or struggle.  

This place bled with history and tragedy, and in comparison it made the wounds of my past seem like scratches.

And this is why I love Kelsey.  She's so hopelessly broken in such a pathetic way, but she WANTS to be a better person.  She WANTS to grow.  And I think that's a powerful message to send to kids.  Personal growth is hard, and it's painful, and it involves a certain amount of uncomfortable introspection, but it is absolutely essential to becoming a true adult.

Finding It is a more grown-up novel than the first two books in the series.  The characters share Cormack's trademark repartee, but there's a bite to it here, an edge that didn't exist in the first two books, and for the first time in the series we're confronted with main characters who are a little bit difficult to love. 

But I do love them.  I really, really do.  And I cannot wait to see what Carmack has in store for us next.  I'm a fan for life.


23 comments :

  1. Huh, I'd never seen some of the other NA titles that you referred to, and I've had trouble with NA so it's encouraging to get recs from someone who understands my frustration with it. Well, potentially anyway, based off what you wrote :). And wow! I must have been living under a rock--I didn't see a single thing about On Dublin Street, but that seems near impossible given the amount of ratings and attention it has on GR... Also, you really like Sophie Jordan, don't you? I remember having read about her newest YA from you and now her newest NA too.

    Hahaha, I like your little time-out too. Very true. I can't imagine puke or after puke ever turning into sexytimes.

    Also it's interesting that you list Kelsey as a Poor Little Rich (white) Girl. Even though Kelsey has a different attitude towards the other sex, she sort of reminds me of Allyson from Just One Day. I'd seen a bunch of reviews that referred to Allyson as that too. While I didn't fully agree with that accusation, JOD didn't really deal with the issue in the way that Finding It seems to, based on what you've wrote. And it's nice to see that getting addressed.

    "Kelsey and Jackson begin to accidentally bump into each other around Budapest. Their relationship progresses slowly until suddenly it doesn't, and they find themselves thrust together on a train crossing the continent. They travel from Hungary through Austria, bungee jumping and hiking until they hit a tiny, romantic town in Italy where they hunker down and pretend their fledgling romance isn't absolutely doomed." <-- How are the traveling scenes? The settings described nicely or no?

    The edge sounds fabulous actually, and I do love that Kelsey seems to embrace her sexuality in a way that neither Bliss nor Max did. It's such a risk to include unlikable characters, but based on what you wrote about Kelsey and her growth, sounds like that risk paid off quite well :). Though I have problems with NA, I'm with you: Cora Carmack is actually one of the few whose work I really and truly do enjoy.

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    1. Just One Day is one of my all-time favorite novels, but I grew up on food stamps, so I had a bit of trouble feeling super sorry for Allyson, whose big issue was that she didn't want to go to med school. I mean, come on. The dude she befriended in theater class kinda pulled it out for me when he called her out on it, though, because it made me feel that Forman, at least, understood the privilege.

      Carmack takes it a step past that. After I wrote my review I looked through GR and saw that a lot of people hate Kelsey as a character, which just...I don't know. It kind of blows my mind.

      Umm, and on the topic of how K interacts with the opposite sex, there is ZERO slut shaming here. She just sleeps with a bunch of dudes until she starts traveling with this other dude. It's treated like she's a man.

      The travel stuff is good. Not as good as JOD, but I think the different settings feel appropriately foreign and different. And the inclusion of things like the holocaust memorial helped a lot with that. Oh, and they don't go to a lot if famous landmarks; they're just in distinctly different places.

      The biggest surprise for me was how different this felt from the first two books.

      Oh! And I DO like Sophie Jordan, although all but her two most recent books were 2- and 3-star books for me. I think I've read eight total by her, so that's kind of just an ok record. Also, haha, look at the cover of this book--there's a quote by her right in the middle.

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  2. I have yet to read any other NA books other than Hopeless by Colleen Hoover. This book sounds great because it sounds like Kelsey is an unlikely protagonist who is far from perfect. Too often do we see the 'perfect Mary Sue' character and that is just boring. Are these books stand alone in the series?

    Jeann @ Happy Indulgence

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    1. Ah. So, this series does that romantic novel series thing (which I absolutely love) where the first book introduces a group of friends and each subsequent book follows one of them as they find love, and because of that, you should maybe read in order, but...I don't know. It's not like there is anything to spoil--these books have happy endings. I think you can read them in whatever order you'd like. I think you might really like the second book in the series, though.

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  3. Oh this reminds me that I still need to read my eARC of the second book, oops (not that I have read the 1st one.) The way you described Kelsey didn't seem appealing at all at the beginning but I'm glad she went through some charater development.

    Brilliant review, Kate! <33

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    1. Thanks, love.

      I like the character throughout the novel because she knows she's got seriously high class, first world problems. She reminds me of people I used to hang out with.

      I'm not sure you'd like this book, though, Mel. Faking It--absolutely. But not this one.

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  4. I've been hearing mixed things about this one, but I'm glad that you liked it so much! I adored the first two books in the series and I love travel books, so I know that I'm going to be picking this one up soon! Thanks for the honest review!

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    1. Christianna, this one is pretty different from the first two. I didn't particularly care for Losing It. I think Faking it was the best book of the series, and this one really, really spoke to me--but it's not light and fun like the other two. The characters are witty, but they don't make you giggle aloud like Cade and Max did in Faking It. Just FYI.

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  5. I'm not the biggest NA fan, but the premise does sound interesting and I love books where the characters are traveling or in a foreign country or something. I read Losing It and it was cute, but pretty forgettable. I may check this one out--thanks for the review! ~Pam

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    1. Oof, NA is rough. I did not particularly care for Losing It. I'm an actor and I hate books about acting/theater (because no one wants to read about people who do the same job as them) and I'm super not into the Hot for Teacher theme. And I wasn't a huge fan of the main character. So it was really not at all for me. But I'm so glad I gave the second book a chance, because it is freaking incredible, and I think this one is great, too. The second book is just pure fun. I laughed/giggled aloud throughout it.

      This is very different from Just One Day, but it's....kind of....similar...? I guess? The authors have VERY different voices, but it has that breathless rushing from place to place and trying desperately to hold on to something you're going to lose thing going on.

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  6. Aahhhh. I love you.

    I'm kind of at a loss for words.

    There were many things I wanted to say and do with this book, and in that inevitable people-are-reading-my-book-freak-out that happens when review copies start to go out, I had pretty much convinced myself I'd failed. Miserably. Not that people weren't enjoying it, but they just weren't seeing what I'd wanted them to see.

    Until I read your review. And damn if you didn't pick up on pretty much everything I was trying to do. Which frankly kind of makes me want to sob my eyes out (in a good way).

    I knew some readers were going to dislike Kelsey. I knew that many people people in my life included) might be offended by things in the book. But in the interest of telling a story that rarely gets told in an open and honest way, I told myself I could deal with those things.

    And even though I did believe that, it's reviews like yours that will help me deal. That will help me remember why I wrote the book in the first place.

    So for what it's worth... thank you. :)

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    1. Thank you, Cora!

      And thanks again for not making them make out with puke breath. Really, really, thank you for that.

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  7. Great review & quotes. I feel so out of the cool group for not reading this series :)

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    1. Well, this latest one hasn't even been released yet, so you have PLENTY of time to catch up!

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  8. Wonderful review! Thanks for sharing some of the quotes so we can see what's going on in the book. I won Losing It and have been meaning to get to it, if I ever can! (Darn huge TBR.) This book sounds great - the allure of the back-packing/road trip really makes me want to read it, plus to see Kelsey sorta change!

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    1. Thank you, Molli! I have really, really enjoyed this series. I hope you do too! It's so adorable and smart.

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  9. Oh there is nothing like a character struggling but wanting to be a better person. I love those characters and I know I'm also constantly learning.

    Splendid review! Nice that Cora recognizes the truth of how people taste after drinking.

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    1. I know. Books about people who are working on growing up are just so lovely.

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  10. I love this series, and I am so glad that it's continuing to be good!! I got declined for this one sadly. (weird since I have reviewed all the others) I can't wait until it comes out so I can get it. I love how honest and true her characters are. Fabulous review!!

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    1. That's a bummer. This one is really good; I think you'll love it.

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  11. I've been waiting for this book ever since I read a preview in Faking It in the beginning of July. I've actually always liked Kelsey, even though she is indeed extremely spoiled. Losing It was a bit of a disappointment for me, Faking It was super sweet, and I hope Finding It will still top that. Ugh, your review isn't making the wait any easier, Kate. Important question: do they by any chance travel through Belgium and engage in a chocolate-/wafflefest?

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    1. No waffles to my memory, E.

      And yeah, I was not a big fan of Losing It. I REALLY enjoyed Faking it, though, because it made me laugh a lot. This book is much more of a...well, it's almost entirely just the two of them. SO there's more of a focus on these characters and their relationships.

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  12. I really liked this review! I've been a fan of Cora's since I read Losing it. Unlike you though, I did quite like that first book. Bliss had this Bridget Jones quality to her that made me laugh so much. But, whereas with Bliss and Garrick, I felt like a spectator watching a funny comedy, with Kelsey, I felt more involved emotionally. I really related to Kelsey's fight for meaning. In Losing it and Faking it, it was pretty clear what the solution to the protagonists' issues were, and the fun was in the journey to get there. But with Kelsey, the solution isn't just "love". Kelsey has a lot more she needs to work through, and so the fun of this book is not only seeing Kelsey and Hunt's journeys to each other, but also figuring out the "more" that will bring meaning to Kelsey's life, and ultimately define her new "home".

    I agree with you that the New Adult genre is a fine line that's difficult to walk, but Cora Carmack - like Tamara Webber, Coleen Hoover, Rebecca Donovan, and Samantha Young - does a great job with it. Consistently. This is a new genre that I have grown to love since my introduction to it via Beautiful Disaster.

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