I was a bit conflicted about this book while reading it. It’s been reviewed here twice before, and they didn’t inspire a lot of enthusiasm. I ended up liking it, but I feel like it could have been a lot better.
I really got off on the wrong foot with Jukebox in the prologue. It has a scene each from Harper and Grace’s lives near to the end of the book. The beginning scene seemed overdramatic, with flowery writing (one of my pet peeves). It also included quite a few sentence fragments and unclear sentences. The next scene was much more intriguing, with Grace’s struggle against the stipulations for her trust fund. In fact, the idea of the dead, prejudiced patriarch who controlled the family’s future generations later was the most interesting part of the book for me, and I was disappointed when it was only a minor part of the book.
Then, the book leaps backward into Grace and Harper’s childhood. After the prologue, I had expected the book to take place entirely in their adult years, so this felt like slogging through back story, even though I did find it interesting after a while. I feel like the whole book would have been more enjoyable without the prologue.
I also thought that the jukebox theme was a little thin. Yes, one of the characters enjoys picking songs out of the jukebox when they go out to drink, but this was a minor point until near to the end of the book, so it seemed odd to have songs be the framework of the novel. If one of them had been a musician or connected to music in a major way, it would make more sense.
Other than that, the writing seems less distracting the further into the book we get, and I did enjoy the romance for the most part, though their denial gets to be almost unbelievable after a certain point.
I think my problem with Jukebox was that I kept getting expectations that weren’t met. The jukebox theme didn’t seem justified. The scenes in the beginning weren’t that significant, and they happen much later. The trust fund plotline is more minor than I thought. I don’t mean to be completely negative, because I really did end up liking it for the flawed romance.
