Candy, LOVE is Dangerous.
Brooks, Kevin
PUSH, 2007

This gripping and provocative love novel basically falls under the genre of teen fiction. With unstoppable and naive romance, Kevin Brooks (author) portrays your typical boy-girl scenario attracting the attention of adolescent readers/audiences.

"I just cant see myself without her. About the best I can manage is the last half hour before we met, when I was just still a boy. I was innocent then." Joe Beck was your typical fifteen year old suburban high school student. Mindlessly getting by with school, Joe played the guitar in a band known as the Katies. Living under the roof of his divorced parents, Joe shared a house with his father and his older sister, Gina. Gina unravels later on in the novel that she is understanding and accepting with whatever choices her little brother chooses to make. Having to deal with her father's racism over her future husband "Mike" she supports any person with no judgement. With a simple and moderately average life, Joe had gained the title as "Average Joe", that is all until he mistakingly met a beautifully, wrecked Candy on the streets of London. As the quote above reads, Joe had an everyday normal teenage life but the transformation that progressed during the amount of time he had spent with Candy, had transformed him into a man with knowledge and a man who had grown deeply in love.

"I don't know how it happened but everything suddenly changed. I was a woman, I couldn't get enough of it. I was hooked." Candy is the alternative main-character. Unlike Joe Beck, Candy had a more difficult child hood on the more real estate part of town. Throughout her child hood, Candy had always been a good looking girl. She'd be the kind of girl that mothers would be proud of and the ones that fathers would over protect. Everyone loved a pretty girl. As she grew older and older, she'd blossomed into the kind of girl that men couldn't resist and the kind of girl that every other girl envied. The author had described that soon enough, jealousy had overwhelmed her closest friends which derived them to reject her. Further on in her years, Candy had carelessly dropped everything and ended up on the streets of London where she drowned her sorrows in men and heroin with her whore house pimp "Iggy". Iggy is later on unraveled as violent and manipulative.

After having several few encounters with Candy, Joe realizes that there's more to life than just school and music. He shockingly falls deeply in love with a beautiful stranger that he barely knows. Throughout his loving obsession, Candy unravels some unflattering truths about herself including being a prostitute, along with a heroin addict. With nothing holding Joe back (Like Candy's threatening pimp, Iggy) he'll do anything for his desire to help Candy with her miserable life. Together, they go through tremendous pains and difficulties to straighten out her life back in order.

This novel is basically set with your classic forbidden love, some-what theme. The story is told straightly from the perspective of the main character Joe Beck which creates a phenomenon sense to the reader. As the reader, you are placed in the shoes of a naive boy attempting to increase his love for a girl he barely even knows which creates a common text connection with high school relationships. The descriptive writing and creativity kept the reader wanting more and more of what would reveal in the next chapter. What was successfully enjoyable throughout this novel was the unique sense of admirable danger. The capability to capture their oddly hypnotic feel for love definitely helped with the twisted plot.

The message that the author could've wanted to expose was the strong sense of the encouraging fight for love that could occur when too attached/obsessed with love. All in all, the novel was filled with irresistible events, unstoppable love and provocative danger. The author had written an almost exquisite novel about two completely opposite strangers falling completely and mistakingly in love.