Having lost her stepfather, grandmother, and mother in the span of a year, seventeen-year-old Lainey unexpectedly reconnects with long-lost relatives, copes with her five-year-old brother's behavioral problems, and endangers her long-term romance when drawn to a young man with an unexpected connection to her mother.
After I was done reading and thought about what I had gained from reading this book, I couldn't pin-point anything. A few days on, still, nothing. Maybe it's about how we should treasure the time we have with our loved ones because we never know what will happen next. Though for that, I felt Lainey was a little too flippant. She seemed detached when referring to the suicide of her mother. Perhaps the author meant to portray her stage of denial. It bothered me though that from the start to finish, she barely showed any emotional response towards the deaths in her family. Yes, she did say she felt sad about her grandmother's passing but even that somehow didn't seem especially heartfelt. The book felt unnecessarily long-drawn. Also, for all the worry about who had custody over her little adopted brother, Collin, I thought the custody of Lainey wasn't dealt with adequately despite being introduced as an issue. Her elder half-sister became Collin's guardian but not technically Lainey's. As the elder sister, I thought Vallery's role as the a guardian and adult in the household seemed forced to get the plot going, particularly because she and Lainey were estranged before their mother's death. Overall, the novel didn't particularly flow well for me.
