It’s official.

I’m eighteen and a young woman with endless possibilities on my way to reunite with my mom in Colorado after five years apart—she had a little weed incident in Nebraska.

At the airport, she springs the news on me … she’s leaving for a month of job training. And me? I’m left on my own in the basement she’s renting from the fisherman, aka her landlord who lives upstairs.

He’s ten years older than me. Never wears a shirt. And makes it hard to remember all the things I learned at Christian Academy.

Did I mention he’s also my new boss?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

I needed the fire department to extinguish the embarrassment from my face.

 

“You deserve to have your breath taken away … every day.” Those. Those ten words. They wrapped around my heart like sticky peanut butter and jelly fingers.

 

Even if Fisher didn’t share the same emotions, I knew he would always be my first love—that really good kind of love where my brain had no say. The kind with no logical explanation. The kind that took a special place in my heart as first. God willing, I would go on to love another. Have a family. And die in the arms of my husband. But …first would always be Fisher Mann.

 

I know they say love is patient, but it’s not. Love is the brightest star in the sky. It doesn’t have an off switch or a timer. It doesn’t wear a watch or look at a calendar.

  

My Review:

 

Jewel E. Ann is a gifted raconteur with an excellent memory. She well recalls the distressingly awkwardness, angsty self-consciousness, and ego-centrism of being a teenage girl on the cusp of adulthood while believing herself to be an adult woman ready to make her own way. Ms. Ann is also remarkably insightful in tapping into and rocking the damage caused to the psyche by the hypocritically judgmental and stridently rigid teachings of conservative religion. She knocked me back to that period of confusion in my life when wanting to establish my own identity while struggling against my parents’ weird religious beliefs where everything was a sin and everyone else was going to hell, yet it was oddly okay for them and their friends to cheat on their spouses and swear like angry sailors with a hangover.

Reece’s storylines were far more entertaining and comical than my own memories but this crafty author captured all the feels with remarkable clarity and deftly perceptive observations. I adore her unique and knowable characters, even when I want to give them a whack with my Kindle. I was totally invested and completely engaged in this tale and continued to ruminate about it when grudgingly forced to put my tablet down and do some dreaded adulting.

I am tapping my little foot in pique and hissing with disdain at the demonically evil cliffhanger – which are vile contrivances that I despise with the heat of a thousand suns. While the wait is thankfully brief one of two weeks before the release of the second half, I have a feeling it will seem like the longest two weeks of my existence.