Oh look at how pretty that cover is. And the synopsis, a bad boy returns and turns the summer of a girl upside down. So dreamy, it has to be good. Right? It should be amazing, please be amazing. I have so much hope… But sadly no, The Last Time We Were Us was a mashup of some of the worst YA offenders and almost the entire read annoyed me.

The plot that sounded so very good, was instead a blend of awful people, places and things. The Last Time We Were Us featured a mother trying to force her teen daughter on the “upstanding citizen rich boy”, said horrible douchy rich boy, a sister who threatens to kick our young heroine out of her wedding every time she breaths wrong, a best friend only concerned with being popular and boys liking you, and the dreamy bad boy really just being super bland. Between the peer pressure to have sex, ’cause that’s what makes boys swoon and want to make you their one and only, the desperately trying tension of “the incident” that happened and the repellent social-climbing of the mother I was super turned off.

Now I will say that there were a few things I really enjoyed. The kids cursed. They are teenagers, they do that. They had sex. They did not have fuzzy fairy tale time under the sheets. However these few things were not enough to make me enjoy this read. Leah Konen did have some good runs in her writing that saved this from being a completely bad read, but was sadly so mired in stereotype that even with the best of writing could not have saved The Last Time We Were Us.