Review: Amazingly heartfelt journey
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 8, 2014
This is a hard review for me to write.  Not because I didn't love it because I totally and completely loved it.  This book is fiction but I'm sure I'm not the only one that wondered when Saranna started following me around and listening into my brain.  From the first line "you're pretty for a fat girl" all the way through the end I was back and forth emotionally.  I only wish I was as brave as Claire, she'd been knocked down so many times yet she never truly gave up.  What an amazingly strong character.  I was expecting a happy ending and while not traditional we got our happy ending.  She stood strong and found herself while losing important parts of her life.  I hated the way things ended with Keiren, the romantic in me wanted them to fix each other but that's not reality.  If this book is anything it's gritty and real.  We don't want to hear it but the reality is that society has put labels on us all.  While it's not PC to admit to it, labels are a fact of life and how we deal with them, how we choose to handle them is what makes us who we are.  Claire spent most of her life allowing the labels to direct her, make her decisions for her, limit her life but in the end she found the strength to get rid of most of the negative in her life and move on with the positive.  The way it was written it wasn't implausibly written as WHAM! she found the truth, no, she went through all the pain that growing forces us to experience and she came out of it stronger.  She's not "fixed", she still has a ways to go but she found the path and she started heading down it.  I am really looking forward to seeing more of the characters that started to come forward at the end of the book, this is definitely going to be a series to follow and look forward to.