Review: 99 Percent Mine

99 Percent Mine by Sally Thorne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Darcy Barrett is the family screw-up, literally. While her twin brother Jamie is driven and successful she gave up a promising career as a photographer and now tends bar at a biker dive. She has spent the best part of the last decade travelling the world, coming home only long enough to earn money for her next trip. After their beloved grandmother died and left her crumbling old cottage to Darcy and Jamie, Darcy intends to jet off again but someone has taken her passport, then Tom Valeska an old family friend arrives to renovate the house and suddenly Darcy can't bear to leave her childhood crush.

This is a difficult book to review, Darcy is both adorable and infuriating, she and Jamie are so selfish in some ways but also so generous in others. Both of them treat Tom like a loyal dog, and fight over him like the last slice of cake, but they also love Tom wholeheartedly. Tom has always felt like the charity kid around the Barrett twins, the child of an overwhelmed single mom, the Barretts took him under their wings and treated him as a third child, taking him to Disneyland when Darcy's heart condition forced her to stay at home with her grandmother for example. But Tom has always felt unsure in his position, like he has to be perfect and go along with everything the Barrett twins want or he will be cast aside.

Yet this all felt very real, these were real people making mistakes, reading signals wrongly, being too self-absorbed, not thinking through the consequences, making things worse - and I liked that very much. The writing felt raw and vibrant. Not your usual cookie cutter romance but something different.

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