Description
“An engrossing tale of a dangerous teen romance” – Kirkus Reviews.
Best of YA 2016 – Suspense Magazine
He was perfect. At first.
The summer before senior year, 17-year-old Chloe starts an internship as a reporter at a local newspaper. While on assignment, she meets Kieran, a quirky aspiring actor. Chloe becomes smitten with Kieran’s charisma and his ability to soothe her soul, torn over her parents’ impending divorce.
But as their bond deepens, Kieran becomes smothering and flies into terrifying rages. He confides in Chloe that he suffered a traumatic childhood, and Chloe is moved to help him. If only he could be healed, she thinks, their relationship would be perfect.
But her efforts backfire and Kieran becomes violent. Chloe breaks up with him, but Kieran pursues her relentlessly to make up.
Chloe must make the heartrending choice between saving herself or saving Kieran, until Kieran’s mission of remorse turns into a quest for revenge.
Erica Freeman –
I had to take a bit after finishing this book just to process the story I heard unfold before me. The struggles, the pain, the elation and the deverstating lows felt all too real. The book is fiction but the situation it depicts is not.
Chloe is our protagonist and she is very bubbly and ambitious at the beginning of the narrative, excited about her internship and the possibility of summer romance.
When that romance starts to turn sour she does everything she can to fix it and save the person she has come to care so much about, she blames herself and when her abuser turns her arguments on her, making her out to be the problem she starts to accept it. She loses her spark, allows herself to be isolated from her friends, made to look bad at her place of work.
As the story progresses you come to care more and more about Chloe and her situation, so many times I found myself going ‘nope’, ‘well that’s weird’ or ‘nah that is not a good sign’. The warning signs were there from the beginning and it’s scary how easy it is to ignore them or write them off as a person’s little quirks.
‘as women we aren’t taught to see the warning signs of abuse’
This is the standout statement of the whole novel because it’s true. We aren’t, we are sold the ‘fairytale’ from a very young age and when it starts to go wrong we try to hide it, pretend everything is ok, blame ourselves for the failure. Chloe doesn’t even think of herself as a victim of domestic abuse, even after everything she’s been through.
I think it was a very powerful choice to tell this story through the eyes of a teenager, as it’s so easy to swept along by the ‘whirlwind’ romance of it, it’s hard to spot the signs and I think girls and women of all ages and backgrounds should be taught the warning signs that could, possibly, one day save their life. it’s a hard conversation to have but it is incredibly important.
This is a book that everyone should read, repeatedly. They should talk to their friends about it, they should talk to their kids about it, it should be on every reading book and book club list of must reads, it should be on school curriculum as a means to bring the subject up with teenagers, to help make them aware and open to talking about the red flags and warning signs of relationships such as the one depicted in the novel.
The author has done a fantastic job of opening up an incredibly difficult topic of conversation and I have to say the narrator gets the pitch and tone of the piece absolutely spot on, she is bright and bubby to start, then we hear her brightness slowly chipped away at, she conveys to us Chloe’s feelings to a point where, we feel them ourselves.
Such a powerful book, I can’t say enough positive things about it. Read it, listen to it, talk about it. Make others aware, open up that conversation.
“I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.”