Review: A Midsummer's Nightmare by Kody Keplinger

Title: A Midsummer's Nightmare
Author: Kody Keplinger
Publisher: Poppy
Age Group: Young Adult
Category:  Contemporary Romance
Release date: June 5th, 2012
Pages: 304 (Hardcover)
Rating: 5 out of 5
Source: Won
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Whitley Johnson's dream summer with her divorcé dad has turned into a nightmare. She's just met his new fiancée and her kids. The fiancée's son? Whitley's one-night stand from graduation night. Just freakin' great.

Worse, she totally doesn't fit in with her dad's perfect new country-club family. So Whitley acts out. She parties. Hard. So hard she doesn't even notice the good things right under her nose: a sweet little future stepsister who is just about the only person she's ever liked, a best friend (even though Whitley swears she doesn't "do" friends), and a smoking-hot guy who isn't her stepbrother...at least, not yet. It will take all three of them to help Whitley get through her anger and begin to put the pieces of her family together.

My adoration for Kody Keplinger is no secret. She's written some of my favorite books and A Midsummer's Nightmare is a perfect addition to that list.  This book was one of my most highly anticipated releases of 2012 and it's safe to say that it did not disappoint.

Whitley is a wild child and yes, she has daddy issues.  Her parents split when she was young and she spent the four years of high school making her way from party to party.  Her mother is too busy wallowing in her own sorrow to notice any of it and her father, who chooses  to see her only a couple months out of the year, acts more like her brother or a friend than the parent she so desperately needs.  When she finds out that he's getting married to a woman she's never met before and starting a family with her two children, Whitley feels completely unwanted and therefore turns to more booze and boys until it bites her in the ass.

Not only does Whitley have to spend the next few months with complete strangers, her dad being the most unfamiliar of them all, but the son, Nathan, happens to be the boy that Whitley slept with the night of her graduation.  To make it worse, she has no choice but to spend time with him and she can't keep her hormones under control whenever he's around.  Nathan is completely swoon-worthy, because not only is he incredibly attractive, but he's also very caring towards his new stepsister-to-be.

Though Whitley changed drastically throughout the book, she never lost sight of herself.  Not once did she lose the cynical personality that the readers will learn to love.  The author did an incredible job creating Whitley, a character that many teenagers will be able to relate to in their own ways.  A Midsummer's Nightmare is everything I expected it to be, from the snarky dialogue to the sweet summer romance.  This book is a must-have for any Keplinger fan.