Allison is dropped off at Andrews College in Maine at the start of her junior year by Simon, the man who adopted her when she was sixteen. She’s relieved when she finds out she won’t have the roommate that she expected. See, she doesn’t do relationships with other people thanks to spending most of her childhood being shuffled from one foster family to another. She doesn’t want to get close because she knows she will lose the relationship and starting over just isn’t an option. It’s too much investment for her. Her goal in life at present is to never get too close to anyone and just stay part of the crowd. 

It’s early in the school year and Allison spills her iced coffee all over the pavement and feels she has to clean it up. She’s struggling to grab all the ice cube and then this guy appears and is helping her. She thanks him and then she goes about her business. The next day she’s walking in the town when she is accosted by Kerry, who is helping her brother Esben with a social experiment. The experiment consists of sitting across and gazing at each other for 180 seconds. Allison finds herself from the same guy who helped her yesterday. The experience of 180 seconds is profound for both of them and they create something of an Internet sensation. See Esben is big on social media and has multiple thousands of followers. The story is about Allison breaking down the walls she’s constructed around herself and learning to live. 

I was really drawn into the story at the beginning and the scene of 180 seconds worked well enough for me when I first read it. I was really interested to find out what happened next and I did enjoy the ride I was on for a while. But then it wasn’t so enjoyable. The first thing I noted is how Allison seems to heal so quickly once she meets Esben. It goes from awkward to a bit less awkward to not a all between them. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen but I know that most with lifelong issues like Allison are not going to go from super damaged to fairly recovered in such short order. Plus the path to recovery is so unlikely to go in that straight line. 

Then there are those perfect hero types in her life: Esben who seems to have the mission to use his “star” status to improve the lives of others. Simon, the single, gay adoptive father who seems to have no real flaws. Even her best and only friend, Steffi, is glorified to some degree and seems to be almost self-less in the way she is looking after her friend/almost sister from their foster days. It’s not that these people have no issues or problems but they all seem to be devoted to Allison and not much else by the time we get much further into the story. Yes, there’s some big stuff that comes out but I never feel like we are digging too deeply into any of the characters aside from Allison. 

So I can live with a somewhat shallow story to some degree but as we start nearing the end of the story things get a bit over the top dramatic and then it gets over the top silly in the process of dealing with the dramatic. I found myself skimming quite a bit during this part of the story and I certainly didn’t feel as much as I possibly could have for the characters. There is a bit of improvement at the end but it never quite recovers the charm of the beginning. I think I might have been willing to give this 3 or even 3.5 stars until we got to this point but this really dragged the book down a lot for me. And I think I am almost struggling to give it 2.5 at the end because it’s turned into something a bit dream-like by this point. 

One other weird point I will make is that even though Allison is a junior, we never get any idea of what she is studying aside from one psychology class. I know we don’t have to know but I think it might have been interesting to help develop the character a bit more. In fact, the only character who seems to have a clear major is Esben’s sister who is an art major.