Being Friends with Boys by Terra Elan McVoy

Title: Being Friends with Boys
Author: Terra Elan McVoy
Publisher: Simon Pulse (May 1, 2012)
Length: 368 pages
Format: hardcover

Description from Goodreads:

Charlotte and Oliver have been friends forever. She knows that he, Abe, and Trip consider her to be one of the guys, and she likes it that way. She likes being the friend who keeps them all together. Likes offering a girl's perspective on their love lives. Likes being the behind-the-scenes wordsmith who writes all the lyrics for the boys' band. Char has a house full of stepsisters and a past full of backstabbing (female) ex-best friends, so for her, being friends with boys is refreshingly drama-free...until it isn't any more.

When a new boy enters the scene and makes Char feel like, well, a total girl...and two of her other friends have a falling out that may or may not be related to one of them deciding he possibly wants to be more than friends with Char...being friends with all these boys suddenly becomes a lot more complicated.

My Thoughts:

Books where best friends fall in love are definitely a soft spot of mine. That said, Being Friends with Boys had been on my to read list for a while now and I was expecting to love it. The problem is...I didn't. It was one of those just OK books. Charlotte is an amazing writer who does all of the songs for her band of guy friends. I loved that she had found a niche in the "boy's world" and could hold her own with them. The problem was that this book was TOO filled with guys. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but over the span of a short time period little miss never noticed by boys is romantically connected to four of them. That is pushing it a little.  From the description I was expecting Abe to have something to do with it, but he was hardly mentioned in the book at all. Oliver her supposed best friend and lead singer in the band was a jerk through most of the book and in the end Char is the one who truly makes amends? I didn't like it. The other thing is that the guy Charlotte truly has a connection with spends almost the entire book ignoring her, blowing her off, and only makes an appearance in the last five or so pages to even talk to her. Once he does it's an automatic forgiveness and "oh I love you so much, but neither one of us wanted to say anything or mess anything up so we just ignored each other and were miserable and now everything is OK".  This book was a big bag of hormonal emotional drama that was quite frankly confusing at times. One of the redeeming qualities of the book was the development in the relationship between Charlotte and her stepsisters, but then again that was solved by constantly letting them make her over. The band aspect of the book was interesting and probably the best and most enjoyable part of the book. At the end of the day I loved the idea, but didn't love the book.  This book gets a 2 1/2 STAR rating.