Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: November 20th, 2012
Date finished: November 21th, 2012
Echo (named for a Greek nymph) Emerson used to be one of the popular girls in school, dating one of the stars of the basketball team. But one night two years ago, her life changed drastically, leaving her nearly dead in the hospital with horrific scars all down her arms and she doesn't even remember what happened, only that it has something to do with her mother, who is now kept away by a restraining order. She hates going to therapy, she hates that her father is having a baby with her step-mum (who used to be her babysitter). She desperately misses her older brother, who died on a mission in Afghanistan two years ago, and now her father is threatening to sell the car he wanted to restore. She needs to get a job, so she can make enough money to complete her brother's project, she wants to discover what happened to her, and she wants everything to return to normal.
Noah Hutchins had a stable and loving family, until his life changed drastically when his parents died in a fire. In school, he's known as a girl using loner, a stoner kid with no prospects. Only his closest friends know that he's been in and out of a series of shitty foster homes, and desperately wants to be reunited with his two younger brothers, who he barely ever sees, because he was judged emotionally unstable when he punched his abusive first foster father. If he's to have any hope of gaining custody over his little brothers when he turns 18, he needs to improve his grade point average drastically, get a good job, a place to live and hopefully discredit the foster parents now raising his brothers. He would give anything for his life to go back to some kind of normal.
The new school therapist, Mrs. Collins, decides to give Echo a job tutoring Noah. She promises Noah increased visitation with his brothers if he promises to shape up, and despite his deep mistrust of social workers and authority figures, he has no choice but to agree to his plan. Unfortunately, because of some misguided verbal exchanges with Echo, the tutoring job might not be something she'll feel comfortable sticking with. Both teenagers are deeply vulnerable and very wounded, extremely mistrustful of the adults around them after facing bitter disappointment again and again. On the surface, they have nothing in common, but once they start talking, they're drawn to each other like moths to a flame.
The book is written in alternating points of view, so the reader gets to follow both Echo and Noah closely. While the book blurb made me expect a fairly run of the mill high school romance, where now outcast good girl loses her heart to the resident bad boy, the book proved to be a lot more than that, and a lot better than the back cover makes it sound. Katie McGarry writes very believable teenagers, and both protagonists have gone through hell. It's completely understandable that they feel angry, and helpless and desperate, and long for a return to the pleasant, normal lives they used to have.
The full back stories for both characters are gradually revealed, and it keeps the suspense up. Noah and Echo team up to try to get access to their files in Mrs. Collins' office. Echo can barely sleep and is plagued with horrific nightmares every time she does sleep. She wants to know the full story behind her "incident" without having to gradually remember it through therapy, convinced that if she just knows the whole truth, she'll find peace. Noah wants the name and address of his brothers' foster parents, convinced that they're being mistreated, and determined to prove it, so he can win custody over them as soon as he comes of age. It's obvious to the reader that these are dreadful plans, but you still go along for the ride, hoping that the characters find closure and some sense of relief towards the end.
I received an ARC of this from Mira Ink through NetGalley, and am sorry that I didn't read it sooner. Not at all the cliched teen romance I thought it at first, it's a beautiful story of two damaged people finding each other, and helping each other through a difficult time. It's currently a finalist in Young Adult Fiction in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2012, and available in hardcover or e-book.
No comments:
Post a Comment