This is a straight-down-the-line American high school teen romance in which recent high school graduate spends the summer in her home town after a year away.  The deal is that Molly Barlow was dating Patrick when she was a junior when she cheated on him with his brother Gabe.  The fallout was so extreme that she had to leave town and do her senior at a different school. But now she is back home until the fall when she will head off to college.  So who is she going to date? Patrick or Gabe?  Would be the brothers be up for a threesome? A lot can happen in the rural Catskills. 

The writing is competent but the plot is implausible.  The silliest part is the twist that Molly’s novelist mother has written and published a novel based on the drama, which has turned into a bestseller.  Her mother shows no awareness of how problematic it is to exploit her own daughter’s embarrassment.  But 99 Days is good in exploring the double standards of youth culture, where a girl will get shamed for having a non-traditional love life, but a boy seems to suffer no consequences. Molly gets the cold shoulder from lots of her old friends, and she struggles to create a life for herself.  She is overcome by feelings for both the brothers, but she never achieves a satisfactory state of polyamory.  She does manage to eventually assert herself and claim some dignity. So there’s a faintly feminist theme here, hemmed in by standard assumptions about romance.

The performance of the unabridged audiobook by Allyson Ryan works well enough. It’s a bit bland when the material has so much shock and humor value, and the accent could be more located in New York state. It’s hard to take Molly’s angst very seriously when her judgments sound so mundane. 

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York