#leave it to PB to give at least some readers what they wanted ... and paywall it 😂

[crazy-loca-blog]

Personal thoughts on Open Heart Second Year, Chapter 19

Note: As the title says, these are just personal opinions on Choices books and chapters. Of course, you may agree or disagree with them, I only use this platform to express my thoughts on what I read every week and what I’d like to see in the next chapters, because none of my friends play Choices so I have no one to comment the books with.

Let’s see… how do I even begin with this? Oh yeah… I’m mad. It’s really hard to be mad at my favorite series, but I’m mad (but nope, it’s not because of what everyone has been complaining about in the last few hours… keep reading and you’ll find out). But let’s start with the good things that happened this week (because yeah, there were many good things that must be highlighted):

The Caroline Bloom case had some bittersweet effect on me. On one side, and I’ve said it before, she is a good woman, and she doesn’t deserve any of this. Her diagnosis was heartbreaking and it only followed the same path as most of our diagnosis throughout this book: terrible things happening to incredibly good people. On the other hand, we had our revenge… sweet, sweet revenge (at a terrible cost, of course!). When we treated Leland Bloom, the man literally bought a new kidney to keep living… and we were all mad at him because of this. Well, every decision we make must have a consequence (good or bad) at some point, and now we know how things ended for him. No one would have ever thought that saving him would mean “killing” the only thing that truly matters to him… his wife.

Also, even though I love the dynamic and the work ethic between the MC, Ethan and Baz (excuse me, but June who?), I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll see Baz in Book 3 or if he’ll keep working with us as he does in Book 2. You know, I really enjoy when the writers give us a chance to have diamond scenes with secondary characters that are loved by the readers, but I think that the scene with Zaid wasn’t there just by chance. Even since the beginning of the chapter we got plenty of information on Baz Mirani, like too much information for a single chapter. Now we know that Baz is a world-class immunologist, that he’s receiving an award that is attached to a job offer, and that he is more into research than into diagnosing people… so Zaid is probably the only reason why he hadn’t left Edenbrook yet. But overall, I loved helping them, not only because they are great characters, but also because now we know that Baz is the reason why Zaid became a doctor, and also because PB keeps teasing us with the type of relationship that Zaid and Ines have (just choose to help Zaid on his words choice and you’ll see). It was a great moment.

There is also this scene with Ethan… even though this is not a romance scene, I’m beginning to think that the OH writers might be reading some fan fictions during their free time, because this is something that Ethan stans have been asking and writing about for a while now. Overall the scene was nice, BUT the fact that some of the content in it is paywalled bothered me a little bit. In normal circumstances I wouldn’t mind about it, but after Louise got admitted at Edenbrook, Ethan’s issues with her became more visible to every player, not only for people who pay the diamond scenes. So even though there are some brilliant moments in it (not only we confirmed that, if you’re romancing him, Alan is the captain of that ship, but we can also tell the MC will be teasing him about his teddy bear FOREVER!), I have too many questions about how this scene went in different scenarios. I personally think I got the proper closure to his issues, he promised to visit his dad more often, the relationship between them seems to be fine now, and Ethan even told Alan that he would give his childhood pictures to Louise (I took the route to forgive her). But again, I’ve bought all of his diamond scenes and a lot of this stuff was already paywalled. But what happens if you took other routes? I mean, how do things go if you don’t forgive Louise? What if you don’t buy his diamond scenes at all? Don’t you feel like something was left there like “floating” and unsolved? Because it does feel weird to me.

And finally, we had this scene with our friends, which I liked it, but I didn’t love it… I would have expected to see them wrapping up things at Donahue’s after completing the bucket list. However, I’m very happy for all those people who wanted to romance Sienna, Aurora or Elijah… because I guess a kiss is better than nothing (?)

Anyway, I wanted to stop for a second to talk about Rafael. I want to dedicate a full paragraph just to him this time. Because there is something about him and his behavior… and I’m really sorry for Raf stans, but something is not looking good here. Even before the incident I had a bad feeling about him, and it has nothing to do with the idea of PB daring to kill him. He’s been a mess this whole book (and nope, I’m not talking about the writing). He rekindled a relationship with his ex that never felt right. He took a lot more risks than he used to do, to the point that he ended up being suspended. Then he quit a job he apparently loved. Then we had the incident, right before he moved to Brazil looking for a fresh start. After the incident, he decided to move to a new neighborhood, and last, but not least, we’ve discovered he’s not a fan of riding helicopters anymore (do you remember how excited he was about this in Book 1?). There is also what he said today and that got our MC thinking... and I think… guys, I think Raf has been going through some HUGE depression during the whole book, but it’s only being more evident now. He definitely needs further treatment, like ASAP. Also, and I know I’ve said it in the past, our MC and Raf really need to have some type of “heart to heart” conversation, a deep one, because in my mind, they need each other to find some real peace after all they went through together.

By now, I don’t even feel like talking about the LIs anymore but yes, I will do it, because even though I loved the night out scene with our gang in Chapter 18, now I’m guessing this could have messed things up with our LIs. In case you don’t know, that night out was supposed to be a “night date”. Maybe that night date was supposed to be the scene where we would have “the talk”. However, we didn’t have that date, we haven’t had “the talk” yet, Edenbrook closed its doors and we were left like… OK… so what’s happening with our personal lives now? I’m hoping to see them fixing this mess in Chapter 20, because right now it looks kind of ridiculous. The fact that our MC almost died should have changed the perspective of all relationships (or at least that’s how it looked like during the incident and after the funeral). After the gala, it looked like finally all the LIs were at the same level and ready to take the next step. Now I feel like we’re all right where we stood at the end of Book 1 (I can see Jackie, Raf and Bryce acting as if we were a hook up and Ethan pushing us away all over again). And as I said last week, maybe this uncertainty is due to the fact that we still don’t know where the MC will go or where our LIs will go, everything is kind of blurry for all of us. But again, that doesn’t mean we don’t want to know what’s happening with our personal lives. Are we breaking up? Are we going to try long distance? Are we moving to the same city? Again, I know in the end we’ll stay in Boston and everything will “go back to normal”, but as of this moment, Edenbrook is closed and we must leave, so it bothers me to see that this part of our story hasn’t been addressed yet. I don’t need our LIs to say those three words, I don’t need them to be exclusive, I don’t even need them to be official… I only need answers on how they’re going to face the future.

Well, if you’ve read all this non-sense I’ve been writing, this is probably where you wonder “why is she mad besides the obvious?”. And my dear people, this is where we go to the very last scene of the chapter. When I saw the limo and Leland talking to us, my first thought was “I really hope that Ethan is inside that limo too, because I don’t want my MC having to make these decisions by herself” (I play as a girl). But nope, he wasn’t there… and that’s where I got mad, really mad… at Leland Bloom. Of course Ethan wasn’t there because Leland knows that he would say “no” without even listening to him, and of course he would go directly to the MC because Leland knows that if there is one person that Ethan would listen to, that’s the MC. Also, why didn’t he just call the board, just like he did the very first time he needed our help? It’s not like he doesn’t know how to reach them. Why did he decide to go to a second year resident’s home instead? There is something so, so weird about this guys… I don’t believe in his reasons to reach the MC instead of people like Ethan, Naveen or the board. I have a gut feeling that we’re walking on thin ice here, especially because accepting Leland’s money means we’ll have to play by his rules in Book 3. And I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t expect to have a happy ending next chapter… I think we’ll have to deal with some huge cliffhanger instead.