Grounding Quinn by Steph Campbell

About the book

Grounding Quinn is the first book in the new adult series of the same name by Steph Campbell. The book was published on 9^th May by Simon & Schuster and it is 240 pages long.

Plot Synopsis

Quinn MacPherson has a very dysfunctional family. Her father is cold-hearted, her mother is mentally unstable and is forever taking a concoction of pills. Quinn’s greatest fear is turning out to be like her family.

When she meets Ben, all she wants is a quick fling with a guy with a smoking hot body. That isn’t quite what she gets though. Ben understands Quinn, with her crazy life and mood swings. She wasn’t expecting someone to love her for who she truly is so when Ben says those three little words, she runs away. She’s scared and she ends up breaking Ben’s heart but he isn’t prepared to let her go that easily. Ben sees something special in Quinn even if she can’t see it herself. Before their relationship can be saved, Quinn needs to accept who she is and begin to open up or she risks losing Ben for good.

What I thought

Steph Campbell isn’t an author I had heard of before but I’ll gladly take new authors in the new adult genre and give anything a go. This one came from Kirsty at http://www.overflowinglibrary.com/.  

At the beginning of the book, Quinn is just about to start summer school after not doing so well in Math. While signing up for her classes, she runs into Ben in the school office. Immediately, she can’t take her eyes off of him and quickly they begin to be friends. The pair have a great chemistry from the get go and I could see why they were attracted to each other. However, the plot synopsis on the back of the book states that all Quinn wanted was a summer fling but this is not how the plot goes at all. Not only does this never get said in the book, it also isn’t really set in the summer either.

The pacing of the book really annoyed me. I was expecting a summer fling that turned into something more. What I got was a tiny bit of summer (maybe a couple of days) and then really uneven pacing and a messed up timeline. In 83 pages ‘a couple of months’ had gone by already so considering the synopsis, I was a bit confused. This really put me off from the beginning and even with hope that it got better, I was disappointed. The strange pacing continued throughout the whole book.

Although the pacing was confusing and strange, the characters were pretty good. Quinn is a bit of a broken mess, something that she confesses to in the very first pages. Her family is a complete nightmare with her mother taking a million pills and her dad just not seeming to care. Quinn appears to be the trouble maker in the family no matter what she does or doesn’t do and that gets to her. She doesn’t understand why her family are the way they are and she wants a better life. I really enjoyed the dynamic of Quinn’s family and the problems that it provides for the plot but Quinn just got on my damn nerves most of the time.

Ben, however, I loved. It makes a change for there to be such a nice guy in a new adult book. Most of the male characters that I have read about so far have been possessive, arrogant and arseholes (to put it bluntly) so Ben was a very welcome change. He was the sweetest of characters, caring about Quinn in every way from the very beginning. Small gestures showed how much he cared as well as saying it outright. I think as Ben was so nice, it made me even more annoyed with Quinn because she just treated him like crap most of the time.

In regards to the plot, I found it to be just ok – I didn’t love it at all. Quinn and Ben’s relationship moves quickly (due to the pacing) but I felt that it was just too quick. Quinn and Ben’s relationship is never defined which I felt was a big thing to be missing, considering they spent near enough all of their time together. There were also too many problems going on for me. If it wasn’t Quinn being a bitch in one way or another, it was her mum or dad, or it was something going on with her friends etc. As there was so much going on, I felt that it really made character development weak and it could have been so much better.

This book had some good aspects but it just wasn’t good enough. There were too many things that annoyed me throughout unfortunately.