Started: February 1st
Finished: February 6th
TSM Rating: 4/5

Dark. Melancholy. Isolated. Bright. Funny. Hopeful.

Those are all the things I felt while reading this book. Tia Williams really gets to the heart of what life can truly feel like when you have no one to rely on but yourself. She also shone a big shiny light on what it feels like to find the one person that truly gets you. How whole that can make you feel when you have and how hollow you can be when you lose it.

Shane and Eva are two very flawed characters. They aren’t shiny and bright like most romance/women’s fiction novel characters can be. And their dark is depths of hell kind of dark, but they are endearing because of their ability to endure. Their unbridled love and passion for each other are the kinds of things that teenage love affairs are made of. The seven days they spend together are all angsty, gritty, horny stuff that makes up the best teen romances.

The levelheaded maturity they show in the end really gets me. Sometimes I read these books that are all about the HEA, but I finish them thinking, These relationships would NEVER actually work in real life. At least not without A LOT of couples therapy. This one, though, I think could go the distance. And I liked that. I liked the feeling I got finishing this book at 3:30 in the morning — when both my toddlers wake up and fall back to sleep, but I’m now WIDE awake, I read. It felt like, These crazy kids might actually go the distance.

I liked that feeling. I want more of that feeling in my books. I’ll pick up a few more Tia Williams books, chasing this high.