Truth be told, How Sweet It Is had me a little creeped out. Set in a small town with a single mom struggling to get by and figure out her teenaged daughter, it seemed like exactly my cup of tea. However, as I read it, it seemed less and less relatable and more outlandish.

Lizzie Carpenter had her daughter at sixteen, and now struggles with raising her daughter, working as a waitress at the local diner, and taking care of the house that her parents left to her, which is fast falling apart.

This is where Tay “Weirdo” Giovanni shows up. While in town to make reparations to the daughter of the woman he killed in a car crash, he overhears Lizzie telling her friends that she wishes that somebody would come and fix her house. So he does. In the middle of the night. And then leaves, and comes back, and does it again.

Lizzie catches him in the act of this weirdness, and naturally, is weirded out. She calls her sister’s husband, who is a policeman, to get Tay to leave. Quickly, her friends, the police, and everybody else who thinks they deserve a say is telling Lizzie that he’s just trying to be nice and that she shouldn’t feel uncomfortable with a strange man skulking around her house in the dead of night fixing things.

Tay Giovanni, after killing a woman in a car crash, is broken. In my opinion, I would say that he is too broken. He is so broken by this dark piece of past that he doesn’t really have any character to him other than his brokenness and fixing-things-at-night-for-strangers issues. Throughout the book, his brokenness is constantly talked about, and it seems to me that we never get a chance to see anything else.

The other piece of How Sweet It Is is that the father of Lizzie’s daughter, who scampered off to live his life and left her behind with a baby, would like to meet that now teenage baby. Teenage antics ensue, and Paige, the daughter, goes on a campaign of stupidity.

Lizzie’s daughter is often described as a smart girl, but she acts in ways that are incredibly stupid. She texts things to her friends like, “2SAD2LIVE” and “& lv M 1lone.” I myself am a teenager, and I don’t know anybody who texts like that. If anybody I know texted me like that, I would beat them over the head with an English textbook. It took me far too long to interpret what the hell this teenage girl was trying to say. The latter text, I at last discovered, was, “And leave Mom alone?” Even my dumbest friends don’t type like that, and truly, that is saying something.

In theory, this book could have been good. In its execution, it was a mess. What disappointed me most was the characters. They lacked personality, and in the case of Lizzie’s sister, I was sure that she was a serial murderer up until the bitter end of the novel.

I wouldn’t recommend this. Much of it was too far-fetched and lacking, especially how Lizzie was treated when a strange man that nobody in town knows plays with her house at night. Good intentions or not, that’s just plain creepy. I mean, would you want a man you didn’t know running around your house while you slept? If so, this book is for you. But I’ll pass, thanks.