This story follows Jane, an 18 year old who is experiencing aphasia after sustaining an injury at the lake. She is dating her hero, Eddie, albeit long distance. She ends up crossing paths with his outcast (literally and figuratively) brother, Fen, and with time finds out that Eddie had lied to her and Fen is the one who saved her life. They develop feelings for one another.

I have tried to read this book multiple times. I was a little nervous trying again but decided to push through. I struggled for over a month and then read a majority in 3 days. It definitely doesn't pick up until nearly halfway through. So pacing...huge issue. I feel like the characters did not feel like they were figured out until about that point. Then everything seemed okay. It was an enjoyable read after that. Not my absolute favorite, but okay. I am glad I pushed through to get to that point. I think my favorite character is Eddie and Ren's mom, Jasmine. She is incredible. I do kinda like Ren's angsty, emo-ness as well. Really enjoyed how it ended!

It was really confusing at first to keep the characters straight, and the writing just doesn't grab me. 3-4 stars for target.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC.

I love Jenn Bennett's YA books! She's one of my faves in YA but I think this one didn't have the same charm as her earlier books. I liked the characters and the story' but I wasn't a fan of the love triangle.

Jenn Bennett is a must read author for me, but this book just wasn’t it. The side characters had more interesting stories than the main love story, the main love story that was based in cheating. And some of the side stories were just left open ended, like why was there ever a question about Jane’s father? I wanted to keep reading to see what happened, but the last 25% or so of the book is extremely rushed, skipping weeks and then eventually months. I’m glad I finished this book, but it was extremely cringey.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me free access to the digital advanced copy of this book.

massive disappointment actually. definitely way different than her usual content but honestly, i would've pretty something similar to her previous works. the love triangle was by far the biggest problem for me in that it didn't really feel like a love triangle. i wasn't rooting for any of the love interests and overall it just made me want to dnf.

I liked the lake setting and the music festival, so I decided to ask NetGalley for an eARC, and I got one. I’m currently in the process of finishing ‘Chasing Lucky’ by the author.

The chauffeur’s daughter Jane grew up amongst the staff of a wealthy LA rock producer, but never a VIP. Every summer, she, and her dad head to the Sierras to work at the producer’s luxury lodge at Lake Condor—a resort town and the site of a major music festival. Jane’s had a longtime crush on Eddie, the oldest son of the family who runs the festival. So, when sparks fly, she does not hesitate to cross class lines. But her feelings about him are thrown into question when she returns to the lake and reconnects with Fen, Eddie’s brother. He burns for her like a horse on fire and will do anything to sabotage Eddie, even taking a wrecking ball to the music festival or Jane’s heart.

I just couldn’t get past the first chapter. I’d rather it started with Jane instead of the brothers. I feel like ‘Chasing Lucky’ had a better opening chapter than this one. This felt slow to start and uninteresting.

I have really loved Jenn Bennett’s books in the past but this one didn’t really do it for me. The overall plot was a cute idea but I didn’t like the triangle between the brothers and just her overall relationship with Eddie didn’t feel believable. A coming of age that just landed flat for me

While this one was written in typical Jenn Bennett style it was not for me. Love triangles are hit or miss with me. I like them when they are done well. However they very seldom are done well. And this one was not one of them. Love triangles between brothers are never a good idea.

Dnf at 10% I tried to read this from the beginning twice. The first time I made it 25% but had no idea what was going on. The second time I just couldn’t get past Eddie. This one’s not for me.

I read the blurb for Always Jane and immediately went "Hey, this sounds a lot like a contemporary YA version of Sabrina!" (No, not the teenage witch. Am I the only one who loves Audrey Hepburn movies? Or the remake? Classic.) And then reading it... yeah, it has major Sabrina vibes. I mean come on, she's even the chauffer's daughter. Anyway, since that's one of my favorite movies, that was okay with me!

There is a LOT going on in this book, and at times it can be a bit of a hot mess. The characters are messy AF and can be super cringey. I still loved every second of it, though.

I love Jenn Bennett's young adult romance novels and this one was one of her best. Fun, summer reads

I have been a big fan of Jenn Bennett's books for years. She is a master at creating characters and settings. Unfortunately, for me, in this book, the characters aren't as well developed as in her past books. Jane is an okay main character, but I never warmed up to Eddie or Fen. Jane's relationships with Eddie and Fen felt uneven and, at times, rushed. Jenn Bennett is an amazing author, but this book didn't live up to the rest of her books.

This book felt like a grown up YA. I love that there is sex, going to college, what happens after a traumatic brain injury. I love that the hero has been pining for the heroine for ages.

I thought this read was sweet, and the romance had a lot of heart. I appreciated the ending, and the MC’s choice, and while the side characters were a bit harder to know, I loved the setting/backdrop.

Quick Stats
Age Rating: 14+
Over All: 4 stars
Plot: 3.5/5
Characters: 4/5
Setting: 4/5
Writing: 5/5
Disability Rep: 3/5

Special thanks to Simon Teen and NetGalley for an eARC of this book! All thoughts and opinions reflected in this review are my own.

I love Jenn Bennett. I’ve read and loved all of her YA books, and though Always Jane isn’t my favorite of her books, it’s no exception.
There was a lot going on with this book. Jane is dealing with being back in the place where she had a serious injury, some familial stuff with her dad and Mad Dog (her employer), a absentee boyfriend who isn’t who she thought she was, and more. Fen has a whole bus load of familial baggage, and a fair share of unrealistic expectations of Jane.
I liked the book and the relationship in the sense that it was dramatic and fun and a good read, but it was also highly dysfunctional and toxic in a way that was never fully addressed. Fen was a tad melodramatic, and I think he made Jane out to be this dream girl destined for him—his living dead girl, his Ophelia—in a way that was… not healthy and never exactly called out. They danced around it, but I do wish it had been more directly addressed.
However, as dysfunctional as it all was, every character was loveable and relateable and so well written. I couldn’t help but enjoy the book, and I flew through it.

There is disability rep, too. Jane has aphasia from a near-drowning (or a drowning? She was dead for a second, I don’t know the technical term). It’s a side effect of her head injury that sort of makes words tricky for her to grasp. The book mainly focuses on the forgetting of words as she speaks. Jane calls it her word-pixie, who flits around in her head and steals words from her memories as she tries to speak them. I liked the way Jane addressed this and interacted with it. I think it felt realistic. The book also touched on having issues with understanding long strings of talking. How at the end of a long sentence or paragraph that someone was saying, the words started to lose meaning and it became hard to understand and remember, later on. She mentioned that this made written directions much more accessible than spoken ones. However, this is only touched on like, twice. Jane mentions it when she first explains aphasia to the reader, and it’s briefly mentioned one or two times in passing later in the book. We never get to see it play out, and that disappointed me a little, because I feel as if that would be a big part of living with that disorder, and seeing her have to accommodate that would have been nice. However, I’m not too put out that it didn’t happen.
My main issue with the rep were some throwaway lines here and there. People—Jane, Fen, friends, family—were constantly clarifying that Jane is “all there” and putting a lot of emphasis on the fact that she’s not “too intellectually disabled”, or something. And that is just… not helpful. It adds to the stigma against people with other mental disabilities such as autism, and makes it out like Jane is superior to people who have more intellectual challenges than her. There were a few other types of throwaway ableism—both against Jane and generally against people who are more disabled than Jane.
The book portrayed Jane in a good light, and as far as I can tell (I don’t have aphasia or a TBI, so please defer to own voices reviewers), had positive representation of her disability. It just also made some ableist remarks, as well. So I feel kind of conflicted on that point, because I doubt the author intended it. There is just so much casual ableism of this type in our world, and we need to point it out when we see it.

Always Jane was darker than the bright pink and blue cover with the couple and the cute dog running around their feet would lead you to believe. This was not a "cheery" story which I would have assumed given the cover art.

Let's start with Fen. He is the 2nd son of a music industry promoter. His dad's parenting philosophy is to promote success by putting his oldest two kids in competition against one another. Eddie (the oldest) turned to ruthlessness, and Fen chose to bow out. As a result, Fen's relationships with both his father and Eddie have suffered. Eddie seems to have been spoiled, never having to suffer any real consequences in his life. And Fen has taken the brunt of more than one of Eddie's mistakes. Since the two have been competing almost all their lives, Fen is pretty heartbroken to find out that Jane has been seeing Eddie in secret. He knew that she had a crush on Eddie a few summers ago, but he thought that had changed.

Speaking of a few summers ago, Jane suffered an injury when she fell off the dam and into the lake. She hit her head which caused some brain damage affecting her speech. She can talk just fine, but she often has difficulty finding the word she wants to say even if it's a pretty basic word. She has in fact had a crush on Eddie for a long time. Mostly, it seems her crush was superficial, focused on his handsome face more than anything. She insults his intelligence in her own mind even while she's dating him. I mean I liked Jane, but this bugged me. Not all people are going to be on the same level intellectually. I'm aware. But shouldn't you at least aim to be in a relationship with someone who can compliment you or be on similar levels. I certainly would hate to be in a relationship with someone I considered dumb, and maybe even worse than that, I would hate to be in a relationship with someone who thought I was the dumb one. Regardless, I was a little miffed at Jane here.

Jane is also struggling with a few things like some rumors concerning her parentage. Apparently, her biological father could potentially be someone else. Jane is aware of the rumors, and we're never really given a straight answer to this question, but that didn't completely bother me. I suppose the struggle was the point in this case, not the resolution. And hey, not all problems have solutions. But this added depth to Jane as a character.

I usually do not abide cheating books at all. I simply do not find any interest in reading about characters who cannot end one relationship before moving on to the next. So in some ways, I found myself gritting my teeth because Jane should have done the right thing in this situation. At the same time, Eddie was so completely unworthy of Jane with his lies and secrecy that I didn't feel too bad for him. Regardless if cheating is an issue for you, then you might consider knowing up front that it exists. Perhaps what I personally took issue with even more than the actual cheating is the lie that I have been finding in books that if something feels right then it can't possibly be wrong. As a society, we have got to get this out of our heads. I get so frustrated by this lie being perpetuated. Feel good does not equal right, especially when things like morals or ethics are involved. What feels good is often a lie--or at the very least deceiving.

I feel like I should have quite a bit more to say about Always Jane, but it did take me nearly two weeks to write my review. Whoops.

Favorite quotes:
-"...your problem is that you always use a nuclear weapon when a simple knife to the back would suffice." "I like to make sure my adversary is dead."

-"Your brain doesn't speak for all brains."

-...my body was so delighted to see his body--hello, friend...

-"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," she said, grinning. "I'm years ahead. We've got kids already. We travel the world and leave them with Ms. Makruhi. There's cake every weekend. Frida does not sleep with us."

Always Jane was not really at all what I expected it to be. I did enjoy it while I was reading it. I was able to block out some things I normally take issue with in order to just read and enjoy the book, but now that it's over and time to write my review, those things I skipped over aren't as easy to ignore. There's cheating, there's the lie of what feels good has to be right, and there was diversity for diversity's sake which I always find annoying. I did root for Jane and Fen. And Eddie being a kind of crappy human being made it easier not to feel too guilty over the cheating and stuff. Obviously that's just because this is fiction. I do applaud Jenn Bennett for not getting too descriptive (for me). Always Jane gets 3.5 Stars. Have you read Always Jane? What did you think? Let me know!

I'm usually a huge fan of Jenn Bennett's novels, but Always Jane was just an okay read for me. I liked it but I wanted to love it. It definitely has some things I loved, like her cast of flawed, messy and very realistic characters, and I thought Bennett did a wonderful job her the Aphasia rep, but overall it just still felt like there was something missing or maybe just that there was too much going.

First, I was baffled by what exactly Jane's job was supposed to be. She works as a personal assistant for Velvet, the daughter of a famous person in the music industry, but for as much as the book talks about her work, all she ever seems to do is try to keep Velvet out of trouble and take care of Velvet's dog. The dog was adorable but the work situation mostly just felt in the way.

Second, there's a weird love triangle situation between Jane and two brothers, Fen and Eddie. I'm not a fan of love triangles so the main thing that kept me reading was that Eddie was clearly a jerk and their relationship seemed to be more wishful thinking on Jane's part than an actual relationship. It was definitely Fen that Jane had a connection with.

Third, I love drama, I really do. That said, it felt like there were too many dramatic things competing for my attention. Jane had a lingering injury caused by an accident that she was dealing with and I thought that would be the focus of the book, but then she also had drama relating to rumors that her dad wasn't really her dad. Then Fen and Eddie had major family drama in addition to having the same girlfriend. And even Velvet had drama going on.

In spite of those issues, I still did like the story overall. It was sweet watching Fen and Jane grow closer. They really did have lovely chemistry and I was rooting for them to find their way through all of the other drama to each other. As I said, not my favorite Jenn Bennett novel, but it's still a solid read.

Definitely not my favorite Jenn Bennett book. I liked it, but didn’t love it. I actually had trouble connecting to the characters so I think that was a lot of my problem. It was a good story, but just didn’t hit all the right spots for me. Can’t wait to see what Jenn gives us next.

*I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. Thank you so much to NetGalley and Simon Schuster for this ARC!*

This was a sweet story about loss, love, and finding out who you truly are. I enjoyed getting to know these characters and going on this journey with them. Jenn Bennett’s books tend to have characters with interests and occupations that are outside of the norm for YA novels, and this book was no exception.

Jane is the daughter of a chauffeur for a big-wig music producer (very reminiscent of the movie Sabrina), and is now working as the personal assistant for the producer’s daughter. She suffers from a head injury that she sustained two summer’s before when she fell off of a dam and nearly drowned, which caused her to have to re-learn how to speak. It was endearing to see her grow throughout the course of the novel and attempt to overcome her disability. She struggles with feelings of self-worth, as well as guilt.

Fen works at his aunt’s vinyl shop and lives in her barn after being kicked out of is family home by his overbearing father. He is constantly at odds with his older brother Eddie, who just so happens to be dating Jane, and seems to be able to ‘do no wrong’. Fen struggles with anger issues, as well as feeling things a bit too deeply, which gets him into trouble.

Seeing these two characters grow close and begin to lean upon each other was sweet, but there was also something about their story that felt somewhat disconnected to me. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I just never felt like I could truly root for them throughout the book. It made it a little bit hard for me to really feel engrossed in the story, which is why I had to rate it lower than I would have otherwise.

Some other things that I did enjoy about the book were the setting, which I thought was beautiful and vivid. I could completely picture this lakeside town and the giant music festival that they throw there. I also liked how involved the parents were in the kids lives, whether for better or worse. That aspect of the story felt very realistic and raw.

All in all, this was a cute story. Just because it wasn’t completely for me doesn’t mean that it won’t be for you! Also, there is a cute dog, and that is always something to be excited about 😘

My Rating:
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

I gave Always Jane 3.5 Stars!