Rose Asher believes in ghosts. She should, since she has one for a best friend: Logan, her annoying, Netflix-addicted brother, who is forever stuck at fifteen. But Rose is growing up, and when an old friend moves back to Laguna Canyon and appears in her drama class, things get complicated.
GENRE:
Young Adult, Contemporary
PAGES:
320 pages
PART OF A SERIES?:
Standalone Novel
RELEASE DATE:
June 5th, 2018
YOU CAN FIND THE BOOK AT:
GOODREADS SUMMARY:
Rose Asher believes in ghosts. She should, since she has one for a best friend: Logan, her annoying, Netflix-addicted brother, who is forever stuck at fifteen. But Rose is growing up, and when an old friend moves back to Laguna Canyon and appears in her drama class, things get complicated.
Jamie Aldridge is charming, confident, and a painful reminder of the life Rose has been missing out on since her brother’s death. She watches as Jamie easily rejoins their former friends–a group of magnificently silly theater nerds–while avoiding her so intensely that it must be deliberate.
Yet when the two of them unexpectedly cross paths, Rose learns that Jamie has a secret of his own, one that changes everything. Rose finds herself drawn back into her old life–and to Jamie. But she quickly starts to suspect that he isn’t telling her the whole truth.
All Rose knows is that it’s becoming harder to choose between the boy who makes her feel alive and the brother she isn’t ready to lose.
MY REVIEW:
**Please note that this review is based on an advanced readers copy given to me in exchange for an honest review. Final publication may vary. This in no way had any effect on the integrity of my review**
This book was so good! I wasn’t sure how exactly I would feel with ghosts in a contemporary novel but Robyn writes such solid contemporary novels that I had to take advantage of the ARC and give it a chance and I’m so glad. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I read it and how involved, emotionally, I got.
I expected to maybe feel emotional about the fact that Rose’s brother had died, tragically, but it was more than that. I felt anger and I felt suffocated and held back. There were times I felt what Rose was feeling so powerfully that I had to remind myself that I wasn’t actually feeling that. All through high school, I felt a very heavy sense of responsibility and loyalty to my younger siblings. I was like a parent to them and I spent most of high school, missing out things because I went home to them. Rose definitely feels that, though its in a much different way. Her brother is dead, he doesn’t get to live on, and she feels like its her fault. So she misses out on a lot of things and it doesn’t really hit her that this is a problem until she meets Jamie.
Jamie represents more than just a romance in this book, though the story between the two of them is really sweet and I was rooting for them as soon as I started reading. He reminds her that there’s a world out there and that her friends, the ones she’d sort of let go on years ago, were still there, waiting for her, whenever she was ready and he is the one that has to pull her away from her guilty and misplaced loyalty. It was so easy to get frustrated with Rose, but I think it was because I understood her and I wanted her to break out and take care of herself and it made me feel so much lighter the more time that she spend away from her brother.
All in all, this book is very sweet, very emotional and touches on some things that are very familiar to me and so I definitely enjoyed it from beginning to end.
RATING:
4 out of 5 Stars
