Wait for It by Mariana Zapata

Overall Rating: 4 Stars

Wait for It by Mariana Zapata
[Audiobook Purchased from Audible]

Synopsis from Goodreads. Full book details here.

If anyone ever said being an adult was easy, they hadn’t been one long enough.

Diana Casillas can admit it: she doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing half the time. How she’s made it through the last two years of her life without killing anyone is nothing short of a miracle. Being a grown-up wasn’t supposed to be so hard.

With a new house, two little boys she inherited the most painful possible way, a giant dog, a job she usually loves, more than enough family, and friends, she has almost everything she could ever ask for.

Except for a boyfriend.

Or a husband.

But who needs either one of those?

 

Review

It’s official. Mariana Zapata (or as I like to call her, MZ, because I’m lazy) is the queen of slow burns.

Though this wasn’t my favorite book out of all that I’ve read already (The Wall of Winnipeg and Me, Kulti, and Lingus so far), I still very much enjoyed the story. I didn’t get bored, which is something I tend to do when I’m on one of my obsessive author binges.

I do notice a trend in her books because they all follow that slow burn prototype and all of the female characters are very similar, which makes the narrating sound like it is the same character telling all the stories, but it isn’t annoying or a deal breaker by any stretch.

This novel received 4 stars instead of 5 for me mostly because there were a couple parts within that really annoyed me. Like how a woman that is responsible for two kids — two kids who already lost their mother and father — went back into a burning house for an old cat. Listen, I get that Diana is selfless. I think MZ did a good job of showing that subtly throughout the novel, she didn’t really need the dramatic fire rescue to prove it. And I actually think that makes Diana just seem stupid as opposed to selfless.

And while I think Miss Pearl is supposed to be eye-roll worthy and endearing, she mostly just annoyed me with her racist comments and rude behavior. I get that we tend to give older people a pass for that type of behavior and I get that she is Dallas’s grandmother (or whatever she was), but all of that just didn’t make her any less annoying. I could’ve done without her character in the novel at all.

Other than those two issues, the relationships (between Diana and her family as well as Diana and Dallas) were just as wonderful as the rest of her books.

My favorite thing of all, however, was that I totally didn’t realize that Diana was Vanessa’s Diana until Vanessa was mentioned! I also loved the parallels drawn between Kulti and The Wall of Winnipeg and Me without it being a series. It was just a nice surprise.

And I am definitely curious about Jackson and wonder if he will make an appearance in another novel. Shhh! Don’t tell me!

Like I mentioned above, though I didn’t love this book as much as the others I’ve read, this has, by far, the best epilogue.

 

Audiobook Performance: 5 Stars

Callie Dalton hits it out of the park again with this audiobook performance. A lot of times when audiobook readers try to read with kid voices, they sound super annoying and take me out of the story, but I think Callie was able to differentiate between adult and children without doing anything particularly dramatic.

 

Butterfly Rating: 2 Stars

I’m not sure why, but there wasn’t too much in this book that gave me those wonderful butterflies. While I enjoyed the book and I liked Dallas, nothing about how he acted or things he did really had me sighing happily. And it’s not even that he didn’t do anything adorable, his little notes were cute, but maybe almost a little cheesy and stereotypical?

 

Re-read Worthiness: 2 Stars

I likely won’t reread this one, even to scan for my favorite parts. There are far too many new books for me to read and far too many other books that I’ve loved enough to read over and over again.

 

Bookshelf Placement: Maybe

I hesitate to say “no” outright only because I already want hard copies of 3 of MZ’s books, it feels only right that I have them all, right?

 

New Top Book Boyfriend? Nah

Like I said, though I liked Dallas, he just doesn’t live up to my current book boyfriends.

 

 

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