I almost quit on this book, but I ended up being glad I didn’t.
Grace and Noah met when she was six and he was seven years old, Their friendship began in Grace’s backyard tree fort and grew from innocent adventures in the woods into young love and sexual exploration, spurred on by Noah and his far more worldly upbringing.
From the beginning. Grace’s loving caring parents encouraged their friendship, knowing that Noah’s drug addicted parents weren’t giving him the care he needed. But then it becomes apparent their relationship is moving into more serious territory than two young teenagers should be, a tragic incident happens with Noah’s family, and the two are separated.
Four years later, they are reunited and neither’s feeling have lessened. They spend several happy months getting to know each other again. But then another tragic event happens, and this time Grace makes the choice to push Noah away. However, Noah isn’t deterred.
Life without Grace was… planning all the ways to get her back. N.P.
There were several reasons why I almost put this book in my DNF pile. For the first half of the book multiple things didn’t work for me, starting with the odd writing style.
Starting out, there is what seems like a journal entry, signed by N.P. But these entries, supposedly written by Noah, are far too mature sounding to be penned by a seven year old. These “journal entries” are throughout the book and give us a quick glimpse into Noah’s thoughts and feelings - which I was grateful for - but again, the maturity of the writing didn’t match the supposed author, until he was much older.
The rest of the book is told by the heroine of the book, and it’s a strange type of storytelling because you think it’s a recollection, but it sorta seems like she’s telling the story as a six year old. But the conversations she’s having with Noah aren’t really realistic - six and seven year olds don’t talk the way they did. And I just found the writing style...odd. It’s the only way I can describe what I thought of the writing. Add in the fact that this was a very rough draft of the book (even by ARC standards) with a lot of strange formatting and words clumped together, and it was not an easy book to read.
The next thing that made me almost DNF this book was the graphic descriptions of the hero and heroine’s burgeoning sexuality with each other. At the age of 13. Look, I’m not naive. I know it happens that young. But I have teenagers and reading about kids that young was just uncomfortable. It could have been sweet, but with Noah’s advanced knowledge about sex (gleaned from watching porn films and parties where his parents and their friends were all stoned), it just seemed like he and Grace weren’t on equal footing in the exploration of a physical relationship. And again…THEY WERE 13.
But once they got older, and life got complicated for Noah and Grace, and the writing finally seemed to match their ages, this book was really good. Yes, there was lots drama of soap opera proportions, but it made for some quick turning of the Kindle pages. I loved how determined Noah was to get Grace back, in spite of her cutting herself off from him. The book started out rather slow, but at the end didn’t get bogged down during the last four years they were apart. The epilogue was a satisfying look at Noah and Grace’s happily-ever-after. It was a great ending to a story I wasn’t sure I was going to get through, but I’m glad I did.
* thank you to NetGalley and Michelle Gross for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review