Rating: 3.25 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | All Romance | Amazon UK
Length: Novella
Seth has come home from college to small town West Virginia to visit his parents. He loves the time with his parents, but it’s the memory of being bullied that usually keeps him away. Seth has a plan; he has to have a plan and a schedule for his life. That plan does not include a boyfriend until after he graduates.
So there he finds himself working in his father’s store for the week with Maddox. Skater boy Maddox with his ever changing hair color and carefree attitude catches Seth’s eye and Seth longs for his routine. But it’s just a week he tells himself.
But a week is enough time to fall for Maddox and enough time for Seth to make some changes in his approach to life. Maddox doesn’t do casual and long distance relationships are hard, but just a week can quite possibly turn into love.
Just a Week is a slow moving story that gives us a glimpse into seven days with Seth. Seth hasn’t come home from college too often as his hometown is not his favorite place, but he’s always happy to see his parents. This trip, there is a new resident in town that catches Seth’s eye the first night he is back.
Maddox lives moment to moment and his approach to life without a plan is inconceivable to Seth. We don’t learn much about Maddox. We do learn how he came to be in the town, but not really why, and we don’t learn anything about his background. We do learn that he changes his hair color everyday and that he prefers to throw caution to the wind. However, the most radical things we see him do is start to build shelves without drawing up a plan and eating pizza directly from the box. Maddox could have been an interesting guy, but his character was not developed.
The main point of the book is getting Seth and Maddox together. It’s mentioned several times that Seth hasn’t visited home in a while and that his parents are excited to see him. Yet they plan time out of town during his week-long visit and have Maddox house sit for them while they are away. There wasn’t enough offered here as to why his parents needed Maddox to house sit while Seth was staying there and if it was a ruse to get the two of them together, then the idea of that was fairly ridiculous.
Everybody in town, including Seth’s parents, loves Maddox. The view that the story takes is that Seth, being all scheduled and planned, needs to change his ways and that he should live life more like Maddox. There wasn’t any balance shown and it wasn’t the best message for me. And then in just a few days time, Seth is willing to make lots of concessions in his life, which would have been okay except the feelings behind it stayed on the page. This was also one of those books where the chemistry between the characters was spoken of, but it wasn’t translating off of the page and the scenes between them read as rote and mechanical. There were also a few other inconsistencies that detracted from the overall story.
This story didn’t come together well for me, but if you are looking for a shorter story with little conflict and a simpler approach you may find something in Just a Week.
