Reason to Breathe (Breathing, #1)

by Rebecca Donovan

[Leah]

New Adult is a genre that’s going to take the book world by storm this year. It’s like a fusion of YA and Chick Lit, destined for readers in the 18-21 bracket, though of course, it’s not necessarily just for those ages, though it is definitely more for the more mature teens/20-somethings. I read my first New Adult book when I read Easy by Tammara Webber and I loved it. I thought it was a fabulous novel and I was really excited to read more novels in the genre, and first up was Rebecca Donovan’s Breathe series, with the first novel Reason To Breathe.

Reason To Breathe is a novel that will make you feel a whole well of emotions. I spent a lot of the novel angry at what Emma was going through. Angry that someone who is meant to be a family member would do something like that. It was awful. It was horrific to read what happens to Emma. I winced every time Emma was attacked, and I just really, really wanted her aunt (although I really don’t want to call her that at all) Carol to get some kind of comeuppance. I can’t help wondering just what was wrong with her. I just felt so bad for Emma. I just wanted to cuddle her. It made me so ridiculously happy that Emma started to flout the rules and started to make her life better than it ever had been.

I really, really loved Emma’s friendships with Sara, her best friend, who is by far the best friend a girl could ever ask for, and also with Evan, the new boy in school who finds Emma ‘interesting’. I absolutely loved how Emma resisted but Evan slowly wore down her barriers. It was such a sweet friendship and I loved how it developed. How they slowly realised they both had feelings for each other. What I liked even more was how both Sara and Evan both tried to help Emma both with her flaunting of the rules and with her aunt (though, again, I am loathe to call her that). Jeremy Kyle would say she wasn’t even a real human being.

I was really impressed with the novel. It was a bit juvenile at times, with Emma constantly referring to her racing heart and unsteady breathing, but I got past that quickly. The novel managed to deal with a really tough subject, that was really hard to read about, and Donovan did it fantastically well. I loved Emma, I loved Sara and I loved Evan. The ending was shocking, utterly shocking. I do wonder if the novel was meant to be a standalone, what with how it ended, but I’m pleased to see there are two further novels, and I can’t wait to dive into them as soon as possible and find out exactly what happened after what happened at the end, if that makes sense. I thoroughly recommend the novel, it was excellent.