Review: A great read for teens
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 27, 2013
Rule #1: Never lose control. Maintain the image of perfection.Rule #4: Never ask for help.Rule #8: If reality isn’t the way you want it to be, create your own.Rule #12: Never let yourself be surprised. Always have the upper hand.Imagine this for a second, you’re sixteen again. Your father is a corporate banker with a prescription pill problem and your mother is one of those women you’d expect to find on any of the shows entitled The Real Housewives of….For as long as you can remember, your mother’s rules related to maintaining the familial faade of perfection have been drilled into your head and your father, when he’s been present, has been pushing you to win more and more accolades because, you know, being class president, valedictorian, math club president, fund raiser organizer extraordinaire, these things aren’t enough. You need to be better. More.Then one night it all comes crashing down around you. Your father ends up in rehab, your mother flees to Paris with her latest BFF to avoid the impending scandal and you opt to go stay with your aunt Lydia to escape them both. You even lie to your friends because, like your mother, you believe that as long as you pretend everything is perfect, it is.This is Hannah, our MC. In the beginning of the book she knows that she can’t keep living the way she has been. Her mother’s rules are suffocating her, the pressure from her father to be The Best is crushing her and the wall she’s built around herself to keep her elevated from her peers is alienating her.So you can understand her need to escape from it all to stay with her aunt near the mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina for the summer, where she tries to figure out just who she is outside of being her parents' perfect Yale-bound daughter.Enter one Jude Westmore. With a brother recently killed by an IED in Afghanistan, an alcoholic mother who can’t hold a job and a sometimes unstable temper, he’s just as lost as Hannah.Together, they help each other come to terms with their pasts, push the boundaries of their comfort zones, break the chains made from the rules that have bound them and even create some better ones to live by.Sounds swell right? Well, it’s not as easy as that. These characters read like real people, with real problems. I loved the fact that it took them time to work through their issues and that they had setbacks and on occasion even reverted into previous behavior patterns because it felt safer than admitting hard truths.This is not some fairy tale insta-love, drama for drama’s sake, story. This is a realistic look at a difficult time in most teenagers’ lives. The bottom line is if you’re under the age of 19, you should read this book and take its advice. If you’re over the age of 19, but still enjoy Young Adult books, you should read this book and take its advice.Rule #1: Be honest. Don’t complicate things.Rule #2: Do what scares you the most.Rule #3: Always do the thing that could get you arrested.Rule #4: Don’t be afraid of reality.