ARC review: 99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne

 

99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne

Rating: ★★★☆☆
Links: Amazon • TBD • Goodreads
Publication Date: January 29, 2019
Source: ARC via Edelweiss

Crush: a strong and often short-lived infatuation, particularly for someone beyond your reach…

… If Darcy Barrett hadn’t met her dream man when she was eight years old, the rest of the male population wouldn’t be such a let-down. No one measures up to Tom Valeska, aka the best man on Earth, not in looks, brain or heart. Even worse is the knowledge that her twin brother Jamie saw him first, and claimed him forever as his best friend.

Tom’s off limits and loyal to her brother, 99%. One percent of Tom has had to be enough for Darcy, and her adoration has been sustained by his shy kindness. And if she’s honest, his tight t-shirts.

Now Darcy’s got three months left to get her life together before her twin insists on selling the tumble-down cottage they inherited from their grandmother. By night, she’s working in a seedy bar, shooting down lame pickups from bikers. By day, she’s sewing underwear for her best friend and wasting her award-winning photography skills on website shots of pens and novelty mugs. She’s enjoying living the messy life, and a glass of wine or ten… until that one night, when she finds a six-foot-six perfect package on her porch.

Tom’s here, he’s bearing power tools—and he’s single for the first time in a decade.

As a house flipper extraordinaire, Tom has been dispatched by Jamie to give the cottage a drastic facelift that will result in a ton of cash. Darcy doesn’t appreciate Tom’s unsentimental approach to knocking down walls, and he really, really doesn’t approve of her current burnout boyfriend. They can’t be in the same room together without sparks flying- and it’s not the faulty wiring. One bedroom wall separates them at night, and even that’s looking flimsy.

Will Tom ever see Darcy as anything other than a little-sister obstacle to get around? And can she stand up to her most formidable opponent—her twin? This time around, she’s determined to make Tom Valeska 99 percent hers, and he’s never managed to say no to her yet…

Let me just start off by saying that I’m pretty sure I have a reputation for being that person who constantly recommends The Hating Game to literally everyone (it’s pretty much my favorite book ever), so would anyone be surprised to find out that 99 Percent Mine was my most anticipated adult release of 2019? It’s doubtful. The second thing that I want to say is that I never, ever get approved for anything on Edelweiss and I almost cried when I got the email that I’d been approved for this book, so thank you, thank you, thank you.

Now, all of that said, I have to say that while I enjoyed 99 Percent Mine, I was a little bit disappointed. I went in expecting to have found my new favorite book, and that was my fault. I really should know better than to hype up books so much in my mind.

I don’t think that there’s anything necessarily wrong with this book. There were a lot of things to like: longtime friends-to-lovers, off-the-charts sexual tension, actual communication, characters who aren’t shy about their faults, lovable secondary characters, a whole subplot about underwear… I could go on. I love Sally Thorne’s writing style and I would be lying if I said that I didn’t fall in love with both Darcy and Tom. But there were a couple things that I just couldn’t get over that were problems for me personally, and again, not necessarily actual problems with the book.

The first was the constant back-and-forth between Darcy and Tom. This is so common in romance novels and I don’t normally have a problem with it, but I felt like it went on for so long in this book. Darcy and Tom were, in all other ways, so mature and they communicated so well, but the perpetual “should we or shouldn’t we” kind of drove me crazy.

The other thing that I didn’t love is that I never felt like we really got to know Tom that well. Sure, he’s perfect, Darcy loves him, he’s the best man on the planet… but aside from that, who is he actually? Everything we know about Tom has been said by another character and we very rarely get to see him in action.

In the end, I think it’s fair to give this book three stars. It kind of hurts me to rate it that low, but I also don’t want to fluff my rating just because Sally Thorne is one of my favorite authors. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book to romance fans, but don’t go in expecting another Hating Game.

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Have you read 99 Percent Mine? What’s your most anticipated release for 2019?
Let’s talk in the comments!

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