For some reason, I have fallen into a reading rut. I don’t have any problem finding books I want to read or finishing the ones I start. I have just read three straight books which I didn’t enjoy as much as i wanted to. Misconception by Ryan Boudinot is the middle book of this pattern.

The concept sounded very promising. Cedar Rivers goes to meet up with Kat, his first girlfriend, because wants him to read a memoir based on an important summer they spent together as teens. I found the premise very interesting with lots of possibilities. Kat continually points out how she just wants Rivers to sign off on the manuscript so he doesn’t sue her, but we find out he has much to learn since she wrote some of the book from his point of view.

I enjoyed most of the book. I thought Boudinot had a wonderful grasp of humor and did a nice job subtly skewering the all-too-common belief these days that a memoir does not actually have to contain the truth. He also managed to not sound egomaniacal when he used his own name as the reviewer of

But as I got to the climactic scene, I just couldn’t reconcile it with what I had read for the previous 200 pages or so. Without giving it away, I had difficulty believing that the characters would have such normal lives if the final scene in Kat’s novel actually happened. Even if she took literary license like she did with other parts of her book, it just seemed too contain too much emotion to not shake these two people for ever.

Out of the three books (I’ll review the third one soon) in this lull of greatness, this book had the most promise. That’s why I think it left me wanting more. However, I think it fell in the trap of shocking just for the sake of shocking. I would pick up another book by Boudinot in a heartbeat though because his writing style made the book a very pleasant read. I’m not not sure he made the right choices to make me happy.