The Boy Who Sneaks in my Bedroom Window - Kirsty Moseley Let me just start off by saying that the max rating this book could have gotten out of me was 4 stars. It lost 1 star automatically for all the grammatical errors (and believe me, there were plenty). I’ve tried to hide all spoilers but a few may have leaked through in the review.

The Boy Who Sneaks in My Bedroom Window sounded so promising to me. A brother and sister are abused by their father. Brother’s best friend sees the sister crying in her bedroom one night when they are young and he climbs into her window to make sure she’s okay. The synopsis makes it sound like the best friend helps heal the girl and while doing this she realizes her feelings for this boy are deeper than she could have imagined. I went in expecting a story about strength, healing, love, and emotional bonds formed through abuse. But instead, I got your typical girl falls in love with boy who’s been in love with her forever, thrown in with some ridiculous and utterly unbelievable plotlines.

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Let’s start with Amber. Completely untramatized by what happened to her when she was younger. Even though her father beat the shit out of her and her brother every day, and she was molested and almost raped by her father, she has never seen a therapist, talked about what happened, or even seems remotely affected by the abuse – until someone touches her which is when the author remembers that there’s an abuse backstory and puts in a freakout. But this is very inconsistent. Like I said, the author only remembers the abuse backstory about half of the time (but I will discuss that later). She’s constantly putting herself in these positions that could have been easily avoided had so, I don’t know, actually put two seconds of thought into them. I just could not feel for her in any of these situations. Oh, did I mention that every single boy to pass within Amber’s radius falls instantly in love with her?

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But of course she never notices this.

Then there’s Amber’s older brother Jake who didn’t really have much of a personality except overprotective jock brother. The only things we knew about Jake was that he played hockey with Liam, playboy who sleeps around, every girl in school wanted him, over protective of Amber, he was also abused by his father without the sexual aspects, oh and he’s also abusive. Wait…what? Yup, you read that right. Jake has anger issues. He beats up his best friend regularly. But this is normal behavior and it’s okay, since he’s just protecting his sister. *blinks blinks blinks* But like so many other things in this book, Jake’s abusive issues are never discussed. Oh, and he’s overprotective of Amber. Did I mention that already? Because the author felt the need to mention that on almost every page that involved Jake.

The third main character of this little story, and the only one who’s anywhere near likable, is Liam – the best friend. Liam, like Jake, is also on the hockey team, playboy who sleeps around, wanted by every girl in the school, over protective of Amber…so he’s basically Jake. I liked parts of Liam – his sweetness, how tender and patient he was with Amber. And come on, the idea of a little 10 year old boy climbing into the window of his best friends little sister to comfort her is adorable. But he was just so poorly written that I couldn’t fall in love with him the way I wanted to.

So much of this story was just so unbelievable that it walked on the side of ridiculous. There will be a few spoilers here, sorry; I will hide the main ones, but I just can’t not point these out. A few examples:

-a school bet over who could be the first girl to sleep with Liam even though he has a girlfriend where the winning pot gets to $4000 and Amber enters (btw, she’s dating Liam at this point and no one knows, so she figures she can win some money)

-Liam and Amber NEVER get caught even though he’s been sleeping in her room every night for about 8 years. Apparently parents never check on their children.

-a 6 year old falls in love with a 4 year old…just no.

-Liam giving up a FULL RIDE SCHOLARSHIP to a school in Boston so he doesn’t have to leave Amber alone during her final two years of high school. Oh but wait, his other genius idea is that she just move to Boston with him and finish high school there…at 16!

-Pregnancy at 16 (which everyone is happy about), but two chapters later, conveniently a miscarriage…

-abusive father leaves his family after being threatened by two 14 year olds, but wait, he comes back 8 years later with a new family and wants to make amends (come on, who didn’t see that coming?). Not to mention, his stepson will be going to the same high school as his kids. But wait, has the dad really changed? Just take a guess at that answer.

-Amber is constantly stalked by the paparazzi since she is dating a famous hockey player. I’m sorry, I’m a HUGE hockey fan, and I do not know of one hockey players wife (aside from Hilary Duff & Carrie Underwood, who were already famous) being hounded by the paps. People generally don’t give a shit about the wives of players unless scandal is attached, especially in a sport like hockey.

I digress…

This book seriously read like a season of 90210...

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Just calling it like I see Annalynne.

I had a huge problem with the writing. The author never set the scene of the book. I have no idea where this story even took place. Despite having two main characters obsessed with hockey and one wanting to go to college in Boston, I came to the conclusion that this book was set in England. Which, I guess, makes sense as the writer is English and this is proven in the wording that she uses (really? Do teenage girls really call their bathrooms ‘en-suite’?). There were just so many writing no-no’s. Switching from past to present tense (sometimes within the same sentence), verb confusion, constantly repeating oneself:

I finally opened my eyes to see him leaning over me, looking gorgeous as always, except right now he looked stressed.

Literally the next page:
He looked really stressed.

So wait...is he stressed?

This went on for awhile. Every time we hear about how long Liam loved Amber, we are also reminded that Jake beat the crap out of him. Every. Time. Same with why Liam had to leave out of the window instead of the front door – every time he left (which was every morning for those of you wanting to know). And let’s not mention the switching POV’s about ¾ into the book.

Now, I don’t know anything about the writer. I don’t know if she has any knowledge about the effects of abuse or if she did any research on this subject. But from how I interpreted this book, I’m going to go with a no to both. To me, it just seemed like the abuse backstory was just thrown in there to make these people more interesting.

All in all, I was very disappointed in this book. I wanted to like it, I loved the premise. But, unfortunately, it just fell flat.