The Secret of Ella and Micha by Jessica Sorenson

He knows what I'm about to say- he always does. He is my best friend, my soul mate. In a perfect world, full of roses and sunshine we'd be together, but this world is full of broken homes, drunken fathers, and mothers who give up too easily.

-from The Secret of Ella and Micha by Jessica Sorenson

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The Secret of Ella and Micha is essentially a story of tragically poor communication learned by two white trash kids from their neglectful and emotionally defunct parents. Ella and Micha have grown up together as next door neighbors, best friends who both have secretly wished for more since they were sixteen. The novel opens on Micha convincing Ella not to jump off a bridge and the reader quickly learns that these two have issues. Between her alcoholic father and her mom's suicide, Ella flees her white trash small town life for college in Las Vegas without telling anyone, not even Micha. When she returns for summer vacation after eight months of reinventing herself, Ella must face Micha and all of the issues from her old life. 

At the end of the day, this is a forgettable, easy romantic read that will entertain you if you like that sort of thing. For me, there's a fine line between a guilty pleasure romance and a cheesy, cheap book and unfortunately this book jumped over to cheesy really fast with unrealistic dialogue and the typical stud-and-virgin storyline. The characters were likable enough and their issues were intriguing, but the overall story was not as well executed as I had hoped. The only major compliment I can give is that Sorenson does an excellent job of communicating the sexual tension between Ella and Micha.Without being too explicit, I definitely could feel what Ella was going through!

My greatest complaint (which knocked a whole star off of my rating) was the insane amount of typos in this book. I totally understand a few regular typos in any book, e-book or in print. But this book had so many, including grammatical errors that made my jaw drop. Who edited this, if anyone? I was shocked to find "then" used where "than" should have been used and the word "pining" spelled "pinning" (for a second I thought Micha might totally be into Pinterest...). Simple typos are normal and I'm not too sensitive to punctuation problems, but I was embarrassed to read countless errors that distracted me from reading and forced me to question the credibility of the author. 

I am a little bit intrigued by the concept of a sequel to this story because at the end of the day I think I liked Ella and Micha, but I don't know if I can handle another book full of errors I learned to correct in high school! I totally respect the author for writing a book, publishing it on Amazon and everything, but heck, I'LL do my best edit a book if someone really has nobody else to do a simple proofread!

Bottom Line: Unless you absolutely love mindless romances, skip it. If you're on the fence, the price and length of the book are right so that you can give it a try and not feel too bad if you like it as much as I do. 2/5 stars -- like I said above, I would have given it an extra star if it didn't have so many grammatical errors.