Scan barcode
A review by iffles
The Last to Let Go by Amber Smith
5.0
This book was hard to read sometimes, but not because it was bad, but because Smith was doing SUCH a good job of telling the story that I could feel it so hard it hurt.
At the end of Brooke's sophomore year of high school, she's feeling like her life is finally coming together - she has worked hard to get the excellent grades that are letting her transfer into a better school, all so she can get out of the hometown and leave her history behind her.
But when she gets home from that last day of school, it's to discover that her mother has murdered her abusive father. With her father dead and her mother arrested, her life gets turned upside down. She quickly hyper focuses on her younger sister, who was home with the incident happened and has since stopped talking. Together with her older brother, they try to do the right thing for each other and their sister.
The book takes place over an entire year as Brooke struggles to accept who she is, who her sister is, and what has happened in their lives. One of the things I like most about this book is that no one is getting it right (in fact, at times, I think the clearly struggling/mute younger sister is the most adjusted of the bunch), and there are times that not only does it seem like Brooke isn't going to get the perfect happy ending, but that everything is just going to implode and get worse. Which is often how life feels - messy.
During that year, Brooke also falls in love, with a girl - and she's kind of messed up enough to deal with any relationship right now, let alone realizing that she's attracted to another girl, so it both brings joy and heartache.
Again, this was often a ROUGH book to read, and since I tend to FEEL so much from my books, I spent the couple days I was reading it in a darker place than usual. But I still think it was fantastic.
At the end of Brooke's sophomore year of high school, she's feeling like her life is finally coming together - she has worked hard to get the excellent grades that are letting her transfer into a better school, all so she can get out of the hometown and leave her history behind her.
But when she gets home from that last day of school, it's to discover that her mother has murdered her abusive father. With her father dead and her mother arrested, her life gets turned upside down. She quickly hyper focuses on her younger sister, who was home with the incident happened and has since stopped talking. Together with her older brother, they try to do the right thing for each other and their sister.
The book takes place over an entire year as Brooke struggles to accept who she is, who her sister is, and what has happened in their lives. One of the things I like most about this book is that no one is getting it right (in fact, at times, I think the clearly struggling/mute younger sister is the most adjusted of the bunch), and there are times that not only does it seem like Brooke isn't going to get the perfect happy ending, but that everything is just going to implode and get worse. Which is often how life feels - messy.
During that year, Brooke also falls in love, with a girl - and she's kind of messed up enough to deal with any relationship right now, let alone realizing that she's attracted to another girl, so it both brings joy and heartache.
Again, this was often a ROUGH book to read, and since I tend to FEEL so much from my books, I spent the couple days I was reading it in a darker place than usual. But I still think it was fantastic.