Perfect Chemistry (Perfect Chemistry, #1)

by Simone Elkeles

[Joni Reads]

This book kept me up at night because I didn't want to put it down. Once I did put it down the first thing I did in the morning (after getting my daughter changed and getting her breakfast ready) was pick up the book and finish it. Needless to say, I LOVED this book. At first I thought it was going to be a going to be the cliche Romeo and Juliet style love story, but then I got so wrapped in the characters. I absolutely love Alex. He is such a great character and I was rooting for him and Brittany from the beginning of the book.
This book kind of reminded me of the movie Freedom Writers with the references to the gang life. Alex shows you that everything is not what it seems when he explains that he got jumped into the Latino Blood gang to protect his family after seeing his father get shot when he was only 6 years old. He works so hard be the man of the house and take care of his mother and his two younger brothers.
Brittany is the golden girl of her high school. She is captain of the pom-poms (her schools name for the cheerleading squad), she drives a BMW, and she is dating a football player. But her life is not as perfect as works to hard to make it seem. Her father treats his home as a hotel, coming and going so that she barely ever sees him, her mother has severe anxiety issues and criticizes everything Brittany wears and everything she does, and her 20 year old sister Shelley has cerebral palsy and her parents want to send her to live in a care facility.
Another thing that I loved about this novel is that when things are in Alex's point of view, Simone mixes English with Spanish. I could hear the characters talking in my head with their Spanish accents. It made it seem more real. And she also does a very good job of making sure that the reader understands what is being said in Spanish without interrupting the flow of the story