I'll Meet You There - Heather Demetrios

Goodreads summary:

If seventeen-year-old Skylar Evans were a typical Creek View girl, her future would involve a double-wide trailer, a baby on her hip, and the graveyard shift at Taco Bell. But after graduation, the only thing standing between straightedge Skylar and art school are three minimum-wage months of summer. Skylar can taste the freedom—that is, until her mother loses her job and everything starts coming apart. Torn between her dreams and the people she loves, Skylar realizes everything she’s ever worked for is on the line.

Nineteen-year-old Josh Mitchell had a different ticket out of Creek View: the Marines. But after his leg is blown off in Afghanistan, he returns home, a shell of the cocksure boy he used to be. What brings Skylar and Josh together is working at the Paradise—a quirky motel off California’s dusty Highway 99. Despite their differences, their shared isolation turns into an unexpected friendship and soon, something deeper.


My review:

5/5 (all the stars in the world)

Oh, how I've been dying to read this book. AND RIGHTLY SO!

Really, I loved this book. It's the kind that I will have to reread at some point, because I adored it. It made me cry (sob, wail, tear up, name it) and I was a wreck, simply because of how sad the story is. I must admit I wasn't expecting this, since I just wanted another adorable love story to distract me from school, and while it was exactly that, it was also so, so, so much more. It touches subjects I don't usually read about, which is awesome and really brave.

I loved how the characters both have burdens. There's none of that "my love will save you" crap that some (read: many) YA books promote, which I found quite surprising. It's more realistic to have two broken characters mending themselves together than one perfectly fine character helping the other one out, so even my mind couldn't make me dislike this book because of a lack of probability. I was heartbroken by both of the characters' stories and as I'm writing this, way too long after I finished reading this novel, I still remember countless details about it and I think about it more than ever. It made me see more of a universe I never knew, so I'm glad I read it. 

The love story develops itself beautifully, really. I felt so many emotions while reading this book that anyone talking to me during this time would've thought I was the one falling in love, because I was, in a way, with their romance. It was deliciously complicated and realistic and heartbreaking yet heartmending, which made me want to cry and dance and scream. For some reason, from the very first moment I heard about this book, I knew it would be like that, so I'm really happy that, for once, my intuition was right. 

If you're looking for a cute YA book dealing with darker subjects, I would recommend this a thousand times. It's definitely one of my favourites now.

Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity #2) - Elizabeth Wein

Goodreads summary:

While flying an Allied fighter plane from Paris to England, American ATA pilot and amateur poet, Rose Justice, is captured by the Nazis and sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp. Trapped in horrific circumstances, Rose finds hope in the impossible through the loyalty, bravery and friendship of her fellow prisoners. But will that be enough to endure the fate that's in store for her?

Elizabeth Wein, author of the critically-acclaimed and best-selling Code Name Verity, delivers another stunning WWII thriller. The unforgettable story of Rose Justice is forged from heart-wrenching courage, resolve, and the slim, bright chance of survival.


My review:

5/5

This book is amazing. I wish there were more words for me to explain how much I loved it, but seriously, it's just too hard to explain. 

I love historical fiction, but this book took it one step higher. It's all about the horrors that happened during WWII, instead of having a romantic twist to relieve the readers from all the stress and the sadness. I really liked that. The story has made the main character, Rose, such a fragile yet strong person that it would take her years to meet new people that she can be herself with, especially if those people haven't experienced horrors like she did. This book truly showed me how, even when everything ended, the war wasn't over and everyone couldn't be happy, because they had just gone through hell and they were expected to go on as if nothing happened. It's really hard to think about all the damages, from the killed humans to those traumatized people who had to continue living for their friends who died. 

I very highly recommend this novel. I sadly haven't read the first book in the series because I can't find it anywhere, but you can be assured I'm going to read it now.

A History of Glitter and Blood - Hannah Moskowitz

Goodreads summary

Sixteen-year-old Beckan and her friends are the only fairies brave enough to stay in Ferrum when war breaks out. Now there is tension between the immortal fairies, the subterranean gnomes, and the mysterious tightropers who arrived to liberate the fairies.

But when Beckan's clan is forced to venture into the gnome underworld to survive, they find themselves tentatively forming unlikely friendships and making sacrifices they couldn't have imagined. As danger mounts, Beckan finds herself caught between her loyalty to her friends, her desire for peace, and a love she never expected.

This stunning, lyrical fantasy is a powerful exploration of what makes a family, what justifies a war, and what it means to truly love.


My review:

3/5

It's definitely a weird book, but I still liked it! It wasn't what I was expecting, but that isn't always bad.

I was confused when I started reading because of the narrator. There are parts like "this sucks, to change in the final draft" that took my interest off, because it was out of place and confusing. I realized later that this book is actually an attempt at a novel from a fictional character - I know, confusing - and that those are the fictional narrator's words. While I didn't get it at first, I came to love this part of the novel, because it makes the narrator unreliable and it had me questionning everything that happened when he wasn't there, since it could be complete bullsh*t.

I had trouble understanding the characters, because there is a lack of background for some of them. Also, since they're young, there's a lot of swearing, which I found weird sometimes. It felt out of place, especially when they were out of Beckan's mouth. I think the characters I liked the most were Rig and Tier, because of their relationship issues and how realistic they are, but, for them as well as for the other characters, I hated the fact that the narrator is unreliable, since it made me wonder which part of what's written is true and which one isn't. It was fun to wonder, but when you're trying to get to know characters and everything you read about them might be completely false, it's confusing and irritating.

One part of this book that I liked was understanding the relationships between fairies, tightropers and gnomes. I liked how interesting fairies are and how rare it is for them to be whole, as weird as it sounds, because I found that to be very peculiar. The way they start to accept each other in Ferrum is amazing and I liked how they used each other's abilities. I wish the ending was better for the population in general though, but I gess you can't always get what you want.

I found it really weird how everyone seems obsessed with the idea of love in this book. I know part of it is because of the unreliable narrator, but I felt like the l-word is pronounced a billion times in this book, in platonic or non-platonic ways, although it's almost never clear. I was always confused by who is in love with who because of that. Also, sex is a big part of this book, since Cricket, Beckan and Scrap are prostitutes, which is something I was really not expecting when I picked this book up. There's a lot of mentions about sex, although they're not really explicit.

The story itself is good, but it's a bit slow. I liked how the war changed aspects of their lives and how the main characters reacted to them, but sometimes Josha and Scrap seemed to react too much.
Beckan is strong and she leads her pack very well, which I liked to see. I was suprised by plot twists towards the end of the book, because I was absolutely not expecting them. The story's interesting and it kept me wanting to know what would happen, but I feel like a big part of it is about the past and not much actually happens. I liked the pictures and excerpts included in the pages, but some of them were unnecessary, in my opinion.

I enjoyed reading this book, my only problem with it is that I have a long list of "but" sentences to add to this.

(Thank you NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)