Boys of Tommen series by Chloe Walsh

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 This series shattered a part of me. The father is abusive, and the mother enables him. The first two books follow the only daughter, Shannon, as she starts at a new school. The other two books focus on her older brother, Joey, and his love life. The fifth book follows Shannon's best friend as she falls in love with her long-time neighbor and best friend. The author, Chloe Walsh, was really good at manipulating my feelings. She did an excellent job of making me feel as though I was there and actually experiencing the story. I just read the fifth book, about the best friend, and it might have been the saddest book I have ever read.

If you can't tell, I love reading romance and happy endings. These stories had happy endings, for the most part, but not without first tearing my heart out. I appreciated how Walsh portrayed the emotions of the characters in a very relatable way. She allowed me to experience a completely different world while also making me grateful it wasn't mine.

The characters themselves were funny and even more enjoyable to read. Gibsie, the star of the fifth book, is one of the happiest people ever. He lacks a filter and doesn't really care what others think. Aoife, in the third and fourth books, is one of the strongest female main characters I have ever read about. She makes caring seem effortless while also allowing herself to become lost in Joey. I felt a connection to these characters in a way I never had before.

I would recommend this series to anyone who loves laugh-out-loud fun, cry level of sad, and teenage romance.

Update: Releasing 10 was published recently, and I just finished reading it. I have to say, I was a little disappointed in this book. While I loved every other book in the series, this one just didn't do it for me. I felt like I got 700+ pages of background information that led up to the present. While I think that this is really important information and I loved learning more about Lizzie and Hugh's history, it felt like too much. Also, at the beginning of the book, Walsh wrote that the books would no longer be written by characters and instead rotate around characters/storylines, which I found really interesting. This is not a choice that I would make, since it will be less intriguing to read, but I think that it is more fun to write that way.

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