Two girls wounded by their past relationships grapple with the undeniable intensity of their feelings for one another in this novel based on the pop-star author’s popular song and music video. There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head. Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. Also troubling is the reliance on toxic stereotypes of mental illness to generate suspense.Īn intriguing but ultimately misbegotten project. This debut’s talented author creates interesting characters and a suspenseful plot to draw readers in, but eventually the narrative loses traction and, ultimately, its raison d’être in a nihilistic denouement likely to leave readers feeling manipulated if not just plain cheated. Alex and the group’s charismatic but troubled, possibly autistic leader, Miles, share a mutual attraction that might date back to their strange encounter in a supermarket years earlier, when Alex decided to set a tankful of lobsters free. They sell tickets and snacks, set up seating and provide support for school sporting events. Long before they know her history, bullies at her new school target Alex, but she’s got allies, too-notably Tucker, a classmate and co-worker, as well as the small community of students at school who, like her, must compensate for past misdeeds by doing community service. After her expulsion from private school for an act of mental-illness–induced vandalism, Alex, 17, begins her senior year at an Indiana public school with trepidation.īright and determined to get to college, Alex counts on meds to control her paranoid schizophrenia even if they can’t entirely eliminate the hallucinations that have plagued her for a decade she relies on her part-time table-waiting job to help keep her occupied.
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