Long After by Cheryl McIntyre

Sometimes Never #3

     For Annie Phillips, there is a right way to do things and everything has a place. College and her flawless GPA are top priority, as is planning her perfect future. Anything less than perfection is unacceptable. So when she meets Loden Guiles, she believes she has finally found her perfect happily-ever-after.

     Chase Malloy is funny, loyal, and an all-around nice guy. He’s also sloppy, tattooed, and undirected. All Chase wants to do is survive college, hang out with friends, and make music. Knowing his best friend’s step-sister since they were fourteen, Annie and he have always had a love-hate relationship. The last thing Chase expects is to fall for Annie, but he knows he’ll never live up to her idea of the perfect man.

     On the outside, Annie and Loden’s relationship appears picture perfect. But behind closed doors, Annie quickly realizes Loden isn’t the man he pretends to be. Every time her not so well laid plans crumble, and Loden proves to be not so Mr. Right, Chase is there to pick her up and brush her off. Will she realize the perfection she’s been searching for has been in front of her all this time?

Okay, everyone just needs to read this series. We've known Annie and Chase since book one, but neither was really shown much of their personality. Annie came off as what she was always called by everyone, a snobbish bitch, and Chase was just was really just in the background.

Annie and Chase have been secretly in love with each other since they were 15. Annie in search of her "perfect" future, successful husband, 2.5 children, where none of them need to add step, half or foster to the title of their sibling. She is basically searching for something that doesn't exist. She has a plan, she is overly organized and a little obsessive.

 Chase has always thought Annie was beautiful but never really thought that he was good enough for her. He just wants to make music and doesn't really have many goals, or not any goals that he feels like vocalizing. He is unorganized and extremely laid back.

Annie at first, I really didn't like her at all for this book, I knew it was her and Chase's story but her as a character is the kind of girl I didn't like being around. She tries so hard to be a certain kind of person that isn't who she really is that she just comes off as fake no matter what. She want's to be this tiny perfect person. Hair and make-up done to precision. Those kind of people aren't much fun to be around. But then I realized that she is just sadly naive. She wants this illusion of a perfect life because she fells as if she was somehow jilted from having that growing up. So when the very tragic and honestly predictable thing happens to her you can't help but feel terrible. Well even if she wasn't naive nobody deserves that to happen to them.

Chase, he was just kind of in the background of the first two books, we didn't get to know him the way we did the other characters, sure he liked to change his hair as often as his socks, and loved being in a band with his best friends, Guy, Park, and Hope. In this book we really get to know him, and he is a really sweet guy. Funny, smart, and really caring for those that he loves.

The thing about this series, is that the things that happen to the characters are things that happen to people all the time, and very few books actually talk about it. This series is worth picking up.