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Book Review of The Hottest State

The Hottest State
The Hottest State
Author: Ethan Hawke
Genre: Romance
Book Type: Paperback


So I haven't updated Goodreads for at least a year. I've been reading, I've just been too lazy to review. So I'm gonna start again! I obviously can't review every book I read, but just for books I think deserve a review from me, or for books that I've been asked to review (if you are an author and would like to send me an ARC, send it on over! I'd love to read it and post a review!).

I found this book at Goodwill one day when I was scourging for used books. Most of the titles there are really weird (Reaching Heaven: You and Your Ways with God and the People Surrounding You. No thanks). But I found this one and saw the back cover. First of all, Ethan Hawke is quite the hunk (seriously). Maybe not anymore, but back when he was all hip and young, yeah. I didn't even know he had written novels, so being a fan of his movies, and his picture, I purchased the book for 12.5 cents (they were four books for 50 cents. Seriously! That's a good deal if I ever saw one. I highly recommend you go to your local Goodwill the next time you're in need of a good read. It's like a treasure hunt; most of the books there are slightly rubbish, but every once in a while, you find a real gem. Plus, you could save a fortune off of Barnes and Noble). I'm glad I did. Here is Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State:

Blurb: When William meets Sarah at a bar appropriately called the Bitter End, he is a few months short of his twenty-first birthday and about to act in his first movie. He is so used to getting what he wants that he has never been able to care too deeply for anyone. But all of that is about to change. And it is Sarah --bold and shy, seductive and skittish-- who will become William's undoing and his salvation.
William's affair with Sarah will take him from a tenement on the Lower East Side to a hotel room in Paris, from a flip proposal of marriage to the extremities of outraged need and the wisdom that comes only to true survivors.

Ethan Hawke really will break your heart. The Hottest State chronicles one year in the life of young, dashing William Harding: aspiring actor and charming lover. When he first meets Sarah, a girl unlike any he's ever seen, he knows from the beginning that he's a goner. She's beautiful. She's elusive. Every little thing she does strikes William greatly. The passion the two share, the chemistry; it's all so surreal, that even he can't believe it. He knows right then and there, that she is the one, that she's the one that he'll love forever, but little does he realize that though she may be the pursuit of his pleasure, he is just a twenty-year-old fool in love, and by time he's twenty-one, he'll just be a broken-hearted man.

The way Hawke captures your interest in enthralling. He makes you become William Harding. I by all means, am not a helpless twenty-year-old boy in love, but throughout reading the book, I really felt like I was. All of William's movements and thoughts, I could relate with. It was so eerie. When William cried, I felt like crying, and when he got psychotic over his breakup with Sarah, I could feel the pain tugging inside of him. There's this one funny scene where he throws furniture around, and it's not funny like "haha!", but funny because, it's a scene where it should have been a turning point. I should have said "Wow, this William is nuts". But I didn't say that. Instead, I found myself cheering him on, because as crazy as he was, the emotion that was seeping throughout all of it, was so legitimate.

This novel was by far one of them most entertaining novels I've ever read, and not only because I feel like it's something straight out of my own past, or future, for that matter. Ethan Hawke will make you laugh, and he'll make you love William's story, but in the tragic end, Ethan Hawke will break your heart.

Radical Rating: 10 hearts- Extraordinarily amazingly wonderfully fantastically marvelous. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Thanks for reading :)
♥Stephanie!