Book Review: Hold Me Closer by David Levithan

Title: Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story
Author: David Levithan
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: language, conversations about sex

If you read David Levithan and John Green's novel Will Grayson, Will Grayson, you probably remember Tiny Cooper, the enormous gay football player who loves musical theater almost as much as he loves both Will Graysons (one platonically, the other romantically). The most heartfelt parts of WG, WG come during the production of Hold Me Closer, Tiny Cooper's life in musical theater format. If you ever wanted the script for the entire play, Levithan has now provided that for your reading pleasure.

Okay, so I know a forty-year-old woman is not David Levithan's target audience. I get that. I also get that when kids become caught up in the world of a story, they want as much of that story as possible. That's why my kids will spend their hard-earned allowance on the Gods and Monsters supplement to the Rick Riordan books. But this is the second Levithan book in a row I've read that I expected to advance a story I really enjoyed (the other being Another Day) that basically just recapped the story from another perspective. This might work for a fifteen-year-old fanboy, but it doesn't work for his mother. In fact, it just feels lazy.

Book Review: Bone Gap by Laura Ruby

Title: Bone Gap
Author: Laura Ruby
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: abduction, sexual content

Finn and his brother Sean live in Bone Gap, which looks a lot like any small rural town. People tend to get lost in Bone Gap. Finn and Sean's mom left with an orthodontist a few years ago, and they've been alone ever since. Well, for a while they had Roza, Sean's girlfriend, but she disappeared too, right before Finn's very eyes. He hasn't been able to forgive himself for letting her go.

At first, I wasn't sure I liked Bone Gap. I wasn't sure I trusted the world Laura Ruby was creating. Was it our world that Sean and Finn and Roza lived in? Or was it it our world, with a twist. For a long time, I wasn't sure. When we hear from Roza, she feels like she's inside the nightmare part of a fairy tale, and I didn't know how a world that contained EMTs and beekeepers who like to make out could also contain Roza's story. But Laura Ruby makes it work. She makes us reexamine how we see the world, and look for the gaps in our own spaces. The book manages to feel both intensely realistic and one step away from reality.

Book Review: Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

Title: Carry On
Author: Rainbow Rowell
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: language, lots of boys kissing boys

If you read Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, you probably remember Simon and Baz. Cath, the protagonist of Fangirl was obsessed with Simon and Baz, two of the main characters in a Harry Potter-esque series by Gemma T. Leslie. Cath wrote fanfiction in which Simon (Harry) and Baz (a mashup of Ron and Draco Malfoy) finally got it on in their final year at boarding school. In Carry On, Rainbow Rowell writes her version of what happened in that final year-- including evil wizards, vampires, magic, and lots and lots of kissing.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Carry On. On the one hand, I think the idea of the book (that's she's telling her version of a story she created for another character to write fanfic about in another book) is pretty fascinating. On the other hand, I think the book draws so many obvious parallels to Harry Potter that it's hard not to compare the two, and the objectives of Rowell and Rowling are very different. While Harry and Ginny Weasley liked each other, their romantic relationship definitely took a back seat to the action and adventure and magic in the 4,224 pages of the Harry Potter books. By contrast, Carry On is 522 pages, and it contains ten times as much kissing as all of Harry Potter. Not that I don't like kissing-- it just seems that Rowell sets herself up for comparison with Rowling, and the comparatively small size of Carry On makes it nearly impossible for the kind of immersive experience someone gets from Harry Potter. So anyone looking for the book to be epic adventure might be a little disappointed. If you're looking for epic love story between teenage boy vampire and the wizard who was supposed to save the world, then you won't be disappointed.

Book Review: Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

Title: Elsewhere
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: A pretty clean read

Liz Hall is fifteen-- never been kissed, never driven a car, when she runs a stop sign on her bike, gets plowed over by a taxi, and dies. Soon, she finds herself in Elsewhere, which is basically an afterlife. Life in Elsewhere is pretty much exactly like life on Earth (people have jobs, live in houses with flush toilets, and obey the laws of the land) except that residents of Elsewhere age backwards. So Liz has fifteen years in Elsewhere, and when her time is up, she'll be a baby, ready to be reborn on Earth (strange concept right?-- are you still with me). Liz feels pretty gypped by the fact that her life is over before it really began, and after spending some time mourning and trying to communicate with people back home (strictly forbidden, btw) she gets on with her (after) life, finds a job and a boyfriend, and works at figuring things out.

I adored Zevin's novel The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, so I think my expectations for this book were quite high, even when I learned that this was YA speculative fiction (that's what you'd call it, right?). Elsewhere is totally unlike AJ Fikry, and it felt more like an experiment with a place, and what kinds of interesting twists on our life Zevin could make in Elsewhere than a great story about Liz and the people she loves. It's a fine read, but not one that kept me up in the night wanting more.

Book Review: Another Day by David Levithan

Title: Another Day
Author: David Levithan
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: teen sex, swearing

In David Levithan's novel Every Day, a teenager, A, wakes up every day in the body of a different person. Sometimes it's a girl, and sometimes it's a boy. Sometimes their life is amazing and sometimes it's the pits. A's life has always been like this, and when he (she?) meets Rhiannon, life changes. A wants to stay in one place, to continue relationships beyond a single day. Every Day is a pretty darn fantastic experiment, and Levithan leaves readers with a fabulous cliffhanger.

So I expected a lot of Another Day. I expected that it would address the cliffhanger. I expected that it would advance the narrative. It doesn't do any of these things. Instead, it rehashes the entire story, this time from Rhiannon's perspective. Although I really liked Every Day, my main criticism of the novel at the time was that it felt a little too self-consciously experimental, like Levithan was prioritizing the "look what I can do" factor instead of focusing on storytelling. And I feel pretty let down by Another Day. I have a short attention span for books in series, and this one lost me. What's the good of a second novel if it doesn't get into the messy middle and advance the story towards the conclusion. While it was interesting to look at things from Rhiannon's perspective, this book felt a little more like one of those books where we get Twilight from Edward's perspective or 50 Shades of Grey from Christian's perspective. In other words, more of a piece geared toward hard-core fans, and I'm not sure the first book merits that all on its own.

Book Review: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Title: We Were Liars
Author: E. Lockhart
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Personal copy
Content Alert: Some swearing, dark theme for young teens

Take three cousins, and one friend so close he's practically family: Cady, Mirren, Johnny and Gat. Add one private island off of Martha's Vineyard and lots of inherited wealth. Mix in jealously, lust, and power struggles, and the result can be tragic.

We Were Liars is a book that's hard to write about in a review. I'm usually one for spoilers. I often like a book better if I know exactly what it's about. But in the case of this book, I think even telling people that there are spoilers might ruin the experience for them. I'm a little surprised that I got my hands on this book and started reading without knowing what it was all about (it got a lot of buzz last summer when it was first published). So I won't ruin it and tell you. What I will tell you is that if you appreciate a great story, a story that requires a reader to be engaged work out what's happening along with the narrator, who may or may not be reliable, then this is a book with a rewarding payoff. Lockhart writes in a spare, poetic style, and makes good use of fairy tales to shed light on the story of what exactly went wrong with the Sinclair family in summer fifteen.

Book Review: Counting by 7s by Molly Goldberg Sloan

Title: Counting by 7s
Author: Molly Goldberg Sloan
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: A clean read

Willow knows she's not like everyone else in her junior high. She's obsessed with germs and disease (both studying them and not contracting them). She counts by sevens to calm herself down. But she's absolutely embraced and celebrated by her parents, who have never seen her differences as a liability. When they suddenly die in a car crash, and Willow doesn't have a safety net of family to fall back on, she learns her own inner strength by pushing beyond her limitations to create the family she needs (from a highly disparate and unlikely group of people), and they all find themselves the better for it.

Counting by 7s is the story of an unusual kid who isn't defined by a label. In fact, the counselor she's assigned to help her adapt to life in junior high, who has a labeling system for all of his students, seems at a loss to label Willow. I love that about this novel. I have a kid who people have tried to label for most of his life. Some of those labels didn't fit right, some we had to resist using as a crutch, and others he downright refused to accept. In Counting by 7s, the label itself isn't important, Willow as a person, a person with unique talents, is what is important. As the people around her come to know her in this time of great crisis, they learn to celebrate the aspects of her personality that some might be quick to point out fall outside of two standard deviations on a normal bell curve.

Book Review: The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

Title: The Sky is Everywhere
Author: Jandy Nelson
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Personal Copy
Content Alert: Swearing, acknowledgement of teen sex

Seventeen-year-old Lennie has always been okay with being second. She's the second clarinet in band at her Northern California high school, the one her best friend is always encouraging to live a little, and the younger, quieter of two sisters being raised by their uncle and grandmother. When her older sister Bailey suddenly dies, Lennie doesn't know how to grieve, doesn't know how to be alone, and feels uncomfortable with all of the attention she's getting. To make matters worse, she's feeling attracted to two boys, Bailey's boyfriend Toby, maybe the only person on earth who understands how Lennie feels, and Joe, the gorgeous French horn player who just moved to town and doesn't understand that Lennie is supposed to be a sidekick. The Sky is Everywhere is a hard, lovely story about a girl who's trying to put her own mind back together after it's been rocked in the worst way possible.

I think most people who read my blog know how much I loved Nelson's 2014 second book, I'll Give You the Sun, when I read it last year (The Sky is Everywhere is her first book). Annie is reading it now, and it's all I can do not to go into her room every day and grill her about what she thinks about it. So the bar was set high, really, really high, for The Sky is Everywhere. Did it succeed? In many ways, I think it did. Nelson does a great job making Lennie a rounded character, someone I felt like I knew and understood. She does incredibly stupid things during the course of the novel and matures a lot in the process. The supporting cast of characters is also pretty great, and the way Nelson intersperses dozens of poems and notes that Lennie writes to Bailey in the months after her death (and finally ties them into the narrative) is also lovely. It wasn't quite as moving for me as I'll Give You the Sun, but I think that was mainly because I loved the way she focused on the brother-sister relationship in that novel, and redeeming people who thought themselves too broken for redemption, while The Sky is Everywhere is more of a totally rocking, very thoughtful, teen romance.

Book Review: Never Never by Colleen Hoover and Tarryn Fisher

Title: Never Never (Never Never #1)
Author: Colleen Hoover and Tarryn Fisher
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: Teen sex and swearing

A girl gains consciousness in a New Orleans high school, but she doesn't know who she is or why she is there. The reader follows along as she tries to piece together her history, and she quickly learns that her name is Charlie, her best friend since childhood/boyfriend is Silas, and that he has also lost his memory. Together they try to piece together their history, which involves warring families a la Romeo and Juliet, before time runs out and their memories reset.

I've never read anything by either Colleen Hoover or Tarryn Fisher, but I understand that both are popular YA romance authors. Never Never is written in a similar way to Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist or Will Grayson, Will Grayson, where one author writes for each POV character. I found both Charlie and Silas to be interesting and engaging, and both authors definitely know how to propel a story forward and keep their audience interested. Many readers are disappointed by the fact that these novellas (the first two are 150 pages apiece) constitute a whole story over the three books, but don't stand alone as individual stories. There is no resolution of a minor story arc in this novel, with the ultimate resolution coming at the end of the trilogy. Instead, there's a big cliffhanger, and bam! see you in the next book. Of course, the books were published as $7.99 paperbacks or $2.99 Kindle reads, so the entire series is not that much more expensive than a single brick of a novel. I'm not sure what the rationale was for publishing the story this way, but it means a little loss of momentum for me as a reader since I didn't dive right into the second book immediately.

Book Review: Kiss Kill Vanish by Jessica Martinez

Title: Kiss Kill Vanish
Author: Jessica Martinez
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Library Copy
Content Alert: Violence, drug use, some mild language

Valentina, a spoiled rich girl living large in Miami has no idea that the Monets and Van Goghs hanging on the walls of her home were purchased with drug money until the moment she watches her father order her boyfriend to murder someone. Despite her love for the boyfriend, Emilio, Valentina runs. Although she has never done more for herself than fix a sandwich, she's somehow able to escape to Montreal, find a job and an apartment, all while eluding the mob.

The plot of Kiss Kill Vanish feels larger than life, and the book certainly has an epic, outsize quality. The main strength of the novel is the snappy pacing-- the chapters end in a way that make you want to keep reading. The premise of the novel, that Valentina manages to escape from her father's clutches, isn't especially believable considering her lack of life experience, and although she's not as bratty as her sisters are, she's pretty bratty. She may have the savvy to hide from a mob, but she doesn't have the savvy to stay away from scary dudes while doing it. She goes from her 23-year-old hit man to a creepy artist to his even creepier brother and back again. I wanted to see Valentina free from all of the guys when the book ended. I can see that Martinez has some great writing chops (and liked other books I've read better) but Kiss Kill Vanish felt too big and implausible to be a winner for me.

Book Review: Not in the Script by Amy Finnegan

Title: Not in the Script (If Only #3)
Author: Amy Finnegan
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: A clean read

Emma Taylor is a teen star who's linked to different boys in the tabloids nearly every week. When she gets a new job starring on the teen drama Coyote Hills, she's shocked to find that her new costar is Jake, the model her bff has been crushing on for years. Everyone expects that Emma will fall for Brett, the resident bad boy, and she's surprised and guilt-ridden when she can't stop thinking about Jake, who's certainly more than a pretty face.

If Only is a series of YA romances, each written by a different author. Not in the Script is really sweet, and shows surprising depth in places (the romance between Emma and Jake is complicated by lots of grownup factors-- his mother's health, her mother's role in her career, her best friend's feelings, the role of the tabloids). My main complaint is that at 392 pages, this book felt really, really long, especially since there wasn't much of a driving narrative besides the relationship between Emma and Jake.

Book Review: On the Fence by Kasie West

Title: On the Fence
Author: Kasie West
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: A clean read

Charlie has always been treated like one of the boys. She was raised by her father, a policeman, since her mother's early death, and she has three brothers who never coddle her or give her any breaks. Then there's Braden, the boy next door who has always been just like any other brother until the summer Charlie turns sixteen, when both she and Braden confront problems in their personal lives and turn to each other, and their friendship suddenly becomes something more.

On the Fence is a cute book. Charlie is a cute character, Braden is a cute character, the boutique where she finally learns how to act around females sells cute clothes. Although the storyline is predictable (no one is really ever in any doubt that Charlie and Braden will get together) and the side story involving the death of Charlie's mother was something I called in the first chapter, it's nevertheless an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. This is a book that I think my teenage daughter would enjoy, not in the gritty, angsty way she loves a David Levithan or a John Green book, but she'd like it nonetheless.

Book Review: Forbidden by Kimberley Griffiths Little

Title: Forbidden (Forbidden #1)
Author: Kimberley Griffiths Little
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: Some violence, death, very oblique talk about prostitution

At sixteen, Jayden, who lives in an ancient nomadic Mesopotamian tribe, has been betrothed to her cousin. It's a fortuitous match, since her cousin will soon lead the tribe, but her cousin is all the bad things-- conceited, dishonest, abusive, unfaithful. The tribe begins to move just as Jayden's mother goes into labor with twins, and the family is left behind to suffer a great tragedy. Then Kadesh appears-- he's from the land southward, and although he's injured he helps save Jayden and her family. As they spend more time together and Jayden has opportunities to see the world outside her small circle of tents, she realizes that she wants Kadesh to be part of her life, even if it means she has to leave everything she has always known.

The spunky, brave heroine of YA novels is so widespread these days, it's a bit of a shock when someone who doesn't fit that mold appears in the pages of YA fiction. Jayden is modest and shy (it's 1759 BC, for crying out loud-- would readers expect any different?), and finds enlightenment and release only in the all-female dancing circle in which the women in her tribe take part. While she encounters many obstacles that challenge her culture and her perceptions, it's hard for her to step out of her comfort zone. That doesn't mean that she doesn't do it, but don't expect Katniss Everdeen out of Jayden. I find her character refreshing, and the historical details are richly drawn. I'm interested enough in the story of Forbidden to want to keep reading the series.

Book Review: Death Coming Up the Hill by Chris Crowe

Title: Death Coming Up the Hill
Author: Chris Crowe
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Library Copy
Content Alert: Difficult subjects (war and family dysfunction) but a clean read

The year is 1968 and the war in Vietnam provides a backdrop for the domestic struggle going on in Ashe's home. His mom is a peacenik who buys him "Hell no, we won't go" t-shirts, and his dad is a hawk who takes every word that drops from Walter Cronkite's mouth as gospel truth until the moment Cronkite suggests that America might want to retreat from the war. As the year progresses and Ashe's own views on the war start to solidify, events that are outside of his control threaten his future. This is a story about family, fear, love, growing up, and facing responsibility.

That's a book you might want to read just based on the synopsis, right? Now, what if I told you the entire book is written as a series of haiku. There are 16,592 syllables in Death Coming Up the Hill, one for each American killed in Vietnam in 1968. That might scare some readers, and if I'd known that was how the book was written before I got home with it, it might have scared me off. But these are not your average haiku. The book reads like a novel, and also like a beautiful poem. At one point, Crowe says that it's what's in the gaps that are important in Death Coming Up the Hill, and he does a great job telling the story while leaving gaps for us to fill in. I love literary fiction that experiments with form when it doesn't detract with from the narrative, and this form works to enhance the narrative. The book is a remarkable achievement, one that captures what it feels to be seventeen in 1968 (as my mother was), what it feels like to face a war, and what it feels like to be in a family that's falling apart. All in all, this is a beautiful, startling, sad, and immensely readable book.

Book Review: Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Title: Before I Fall
Author: Lauren Oliver
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: Swearing, lots of underage drinking, violence, suicide, talking about sex

It's February 12, the last day of Samantha Kingston's life. The first time Samantha lives through February 12th, she self-involved and cruel at times, reveling in her popularity and her circle of friends, and when she and her three best friends speed off, drunk, in an ice storm, their deaths feel somehow deserved. But Samantha gets a second chance, and a third, and even a sixth and seventh, not to escape death, but to live a meaningful last day of her life.

The premise of Before I Fall isn't that unique-- it's a Groundhog Day story. Samantha has one day to make things right in the world, which is a tall order. Each time she relives the day, she gains insight into her own life, her actions, and into making peace with her existence. The book is an interesting exploration into the life of teenage girls, popularity, and into the idea that the choices you make in a single day really can make a difference.

Book Review: Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley

Title: Where Things Come Back
Author: John Corey Whaley
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: sex (implied but teenage), missing children, some swearing

Cullen is having a rough summer-- his cousin recently died of a drug overdose, and the sleepy Arkansas town he lives in is caught up in a frenzy over the supposed reappearance of a woodpecker that was thought to be long-extinct. Then Cullen's brother, Gabriel disappears, and he's caught up in feelings of rage an ineptitude. Cullen's story alternates with the story of a young missionary who's losing his faith while serving in Africa. While these two stories seem like a strange juxtaposition at first, they eventually come together in a satisfying way.

I know this book got a lot of hype (it won the Printz Award in 2012), but I felt that there was more emphasis on style than on storytelling. The alternating stories seemed so jarring in the beginning, and there seemed to be little emotion surrounding the conclusion to the story (which should have elicited a lot of emotion). Cullen was a somewhat unsympathetic protagonist-- I felt bad for his predicament, but didn't always identify with his actions or see them as a result of his grief.

Book Review: I'll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson

Title: I'll Give You the Sun
Author: Jandy Nelson
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: swearing, sex, death of a parent

At thirteen, Noah sees the world through his artwork. Nearly everything important to him shows up in his sketchbook, and his mother, an art history professor seems to truly understand and nurture his gift. His twin, Jude, is the quintessential California surfer girl, a Daddy's girl. Despite the fact that Jude seems to run a little wild, and the two suffer from jealousies, misunderstandings, and crushes on the same boy, they're also incredibly close. When tragedy tears their family apart, their roles in the family seem to reverse, and the book examines two teens in crisis, and how they work their way back toward wholeness.

I'll Give You the Sun is a beautiful book. It's hard to write about without giving too much away, but when we encounter Jude and Noah as sixteen-year-olds, both are carrying incredible guilt for things they've done. While a less adept writer might turn the book sentimental or sermonize about the choices they make, Jandy Nelson tells a story where the twins find a sense of wholeness and learn to embrace the things they love, after a time when neither one feels worthy of love. In the same sort of sobfest vein as The Fault in Our Stars (but even better in a way, because I loved the sibling story), this is a book where love, family, and forgiveness are at the very center of the narrative. It's pretty realistic in its portrayal of struggling teenagers, so it might not be a great choice for more sensitive readers.

Book Review: The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp

Title: The Spectacular Now
Author: Tim Tharp
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: lots of swearing, sex, underage drug and (pervasive) alcohol use (including lots and lots of drunk driving)

Sutter Keely is the kind of guy I watched from a distance in high school. He's the life of every party. He has a huge heart. He's also trouble with a capital T. The opening scene of the novel pretty much sums up his character-- Sutter is supposed to be driving to his girlfriend's house to take her to get her hair cut, but instead he's nursing a 7Up spiked with vodka while driving around Oklahoma City, skipping school on a beautiful late winter day, when he spots a small boy all alone. Sutter finds that the boy is running away from home (and not sure exactly where he lives), and the two spend the next hour finding his house, where Sutter gets bawled out by the boy's mother, and then gets bawled out by his girlfriend for missing the appointment. He doesn't have much of anything together, and he has a serious drinking problem.

When the girlfriend dumps Sutter's sorry self, he starts hanging out with Aimee, who is smart, but nerdy, and totally clueless. She's spent most of her high school years delivering a paper route for her mother, and her stepfather and brother boss her around regularly. A normal YA novel would probably have Sutter clean up his act as a result of hanging out with Aimee, while Aimee would gain some social skills and a backbone. But that's not what happens. What does happen instead is more realistic and messy, and definitely worth reading to find out. I love that Tharp is working with ambiguity and complicated characters in this novel, and I'm now eager to watch the screen adaptation of The Spectacular Now (starring Shailene Woodley as Aimee and Miles Teller as Sutter).

Book Review: Relax, I'm a Ninja by Natalie Whipple

Title: Relax, I'm a Ninja
Author: Natalie Whipple
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: mild language, kissing, sharing a bed but no sex, violence

Tosh is a nerd at a San Francisco prep school by day, flying under the radar. But by night, he's the best young ninja in the city, trained by his father (who runs a karate studio as a front). Amy is a fellow student, both at the prep school and at the dojo, and Tosh's father invites her to train to become a ninja just as a serial killer starts killing people all around the city, leaving behind the unmistakable mark of the ninja poison Dragon Bile. As Tosh and Amy work to uncover who's behind the murders, they also discover that they have feelings for each other.

Relax, I'm a Ninja is a really fun read. It has just the right amount of action, well-drawn rounded characters in Tosh and Amy, a fun, smart mystery, and a little romance. In fact, the romance was one thing that made this book hard to classify. On the one hand, it's got the kind of action I think my teenage son would totally dig. I'd put it in the Hunger Games/Divergent- strong girl camp, except that the narrator is a guy. On the other hand, Tosh talks A LOT about what he's feeling about Amy, which made it feel a little girly (sorry, gross generalization, I know).  And then theres the fact that about halfway through the novel, it shifts from our everyday world to a speculative world where ninjas can steal souls and have superpowers and stuff like that. I liked that surprise and thinks it works here, but that ordinarily would be a strike against the narrative for me.

So I guess I'll give this book to both of my teenagers and suggest they read it. I think they'll both love it, for different reasons. And yes, there will be a sequel or two. It feels written to be a movie or three.

Book Review: Where She Went by Gail Forman

Title: Where She Went
Author: Gail Forman
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: sex, language, and drug use

I finished If I Stay, and immediately purchased Where She Went (what can I say-- the Kindle makes it so easy-- it was recommended right there in the screen that pops up once you finish the book. In fact, ordering on the Kindle is so easy that my toddlers have ordered three Elmo movies and a $500 printer in the last week). I started reading the book right away, because I was so captivated by the first book. The story picks up three years after If I Stay leaves off.

Adam's band has hit it big. They have several platinum records under their belts and are in New York for one day before heading off to tour in Europe. But ever since Mia left for Julliard and wrote him out of her life, he's been reeling. He doesn't like the person he's become, and things are so tense with the band that they can't even stay at the same hotel. He's taking drugs for his anxiety and not sleeping, and he's pretty much just a jerk. Then, on the day he's supposed to leave, he walks by Carnegie Hall and sees that Mia is playing a cello concert there that night. So he buys a ticket, and that changes everything.

While Where She Went is another interesting novel, and I read it quickly and with gusto, I didn't enjoy it as much as its predecessor. This is Adam's story in the way that If I Stay was Mia's story, but I really appreciated the structure of If I Stay, with its flashbacks and removed point of view (with Mia sort of hovering above everything), and Where She Went was much more forward momentum. It was a satisfying conclusion to the story, just not quite as satisfying or inventive as If I Stay.