Love and Olives

Liv Varankis is going to Greece to spend ten days with her father.  Her mom isn't really giving her a choice despite Liv's own plans to go on a senior trip with her boyfriend and his friends and the fact that she hasn't seen her father in nine years.  So...yeah, she has no desire to spend time with a man whose only contact has been the occasional postcard.

She never even talks about her dad.  It's too embarrassing to tell people her father abandoned her to search for the lost city of Atlantis.  She's spent the last nine years transforming herself from Olive, the sad little girl who misses her father, into Liv who is stylish and has a cute boyfriend.

Things go wrong right from the beginning.  Her dad is not even there to meet her at the airport.  Instead, it's some guy she's never heard of named Theo with a motorbike.  When she finally does see her dad it's super awkward.  Plus, his big surprise is a documentary about Atlantis.  Atlantis!  She never wants to hear that word again.  Finally, Theo and her dad convince Liv to join the crew and they begin filming.  

But her dad keeps disappearing without real explanation leaving Liv and Theo to work alone.  Why did he even want her to come if he wasn't going to spend time with her?  Plus, her boyfriend back home won't text or call because he's still mad about her last-minute change of plans.  

Theo is very attractive.  Liv has to keep reminding herself she has a boyfriend!  But he's also kind of annoying.  He acts like he knows her father and her relationship better than she does and he keeps pushing her to get over her anger with her father.  But he also pushes her out of her comfort zone and into taking some risks and having a little fun, and every day she questions her relationship with her controlling boyfriend even more.  

Will Liv find love in Santorini? And will she be able to mend her damaged relationship with her father?

This is the third book in Jenna Evans Welch's series about love and adventure.  Each book is really a stand-alone, this one even more so than the others.  However, this is my least favorite of the three as it really stretches credulity.  First of all, Liv has terrible taste in boys.  Her boyfriend Dax is controlling and withholding, but Theo has his own problems.  He acts like he understands the situation with her father completely even though he knows nothing about her life.  He may have more details about her father's current situation, but it's not his life.  Then there is her father.  No matter the reason, a father can't drop out of a child's life for nine years and expect everything to be perfectly fine when he decides to reappear, but all the characters seem to expect Liv to just roll with it.  Every time she does stand up for herself, she is proven "wrong" and ends up shamed for her feelings even though her father did abandon her for nine years, and he is lying to her when they finally see each other again.  I really enjoyed the first and second books in this series, but I could have passed on this one.