Heartsick by Caitlin Sinead

Sinead

Summary via Goodreads:

       Quinn is looking forward to her senior year at Poe University. She has big plans to hang out with her best friend, flirt with a certain boy genius, party at her favorite dive bar and figure out what she's going to do after graduation with her not-so-useful art major. But that's before she meets Luke, a hot townie who's moved back home to help take care of his dying sister. And it's before a weird epidemic sweeps across campus, mysteriously turning people's eyes purple.

    Is it an odd side effect from a new party drug?

Is it a rogue virus developed in a campus lab?

Is it the mark of the devil?

       Soon the town starts blaming the university and the student religious group becomes frighteningly aggressive in their on-campus accusations. Quinn and Luke are caught in the middle—until a tragic accident forces Luke to reveal the one part of himself he's kept carefully hidden. That he's so much more than the happy-go-lucky boy next door Quinn had believed him to be isn't a surprise…but this truth might be too dangerous for her to handle.

I received this book from NetGalley for review.

I just finished this book, and I am still trying to figure out how I feel about it. It was written well. But the tense was strange for me. It almost read like the narrator, Quinn, was telling events of something that already happened, rather than present tense. I liked that when her classes were mentioned, it was glossed over since the classroom content wasn't important to the story. However, there was just something about how this story was told that felt odd to me. I had a hard time figuring out what the actual plot was since there were a couple things the main story arch could be. From the death of a student that one member of the town is still angry about to Quinn's romantic life, and then there were the people's eyes turning purple thing. All these things were given the same amount of attention.

I liked Quinn. She was a "real" college attending person. She went to parties, she drank alcohol, she dated more than one person and didn't call any of them her boyfriend or promise them more than what she was willing to give. She had flaws and had a pretty good sense of humor. The rest of the characters felt a little one dimensional in comparison, at least to me they did.

This was a fast and engaging read, I just had a little bit of a hard time getting into the plot of the epidemic that swept through the town. It felt a little forced to me and was less interesting to me than the rest of what was going on.