This review contains spoilers!!!
Me Since You by Laura Wiess
Before and After. That’s how Rowan Areno sees her life now. Before: she was a normal sixteen-year-old—a little too sheltered by her police officer father and her mother. After: everything she once believed has been destroyed in the wake of a shattering tragedy, and every day is there to be survived.
If she had known, on that Friday in March when she cut school, that a random stranger’s shocking crime would have traumatic consequences, she never would have left campus. If the crime video never went viral, maybe she could have saved her mother, grandmother — and herself — from the endless replay of heartache and grief.
Finding a soul mate in Eli, a witness to the crime who is haunted by losses of his own, Rowan begins to see there is no simple, straightforward path to healing wounded hearts. Can she learn to trust, hope, and believe in happiness again?
I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest opinion.
This book was filled with grief. Rowan was a typical teenage girl, skipping school, missing curfew and partying with her friend Nadia. She's not very good at it because she gets caught just about every time. Her parents are strict, her dad, Nick, is a cop, so he worries about her. One day though he is just angry that she skipped school and he takes her home. While he takes her, he gets a call to go to a scene where a man is standing on a ledge with his baby strapped to him. There's also a boy named Eli there at the wrong place and the wrong time, he's the one that called 9-1-1. He's trying to get the man to get off the ledge or hand over his baby, but this man, he's determined to end things.
Nick tries to hold the guy off, wait for the response team to get there but he's unsuccessful, the man jumps and takes his three month old son with him. Nick is devastated and then the video from his car is leaked and that doesn't help matters. In fact it makes people call for his blood. He should be FIRED! How can the police just sit back and let a man stay on the force that was incompetent? He should have to pay for that baby's funeral.
On and on it goes and Rowan can see that it's taking a toll on her father, he sinks further and further in to a depression. It becomes too much for him and he does something drastic. It leaves Rowan questioning everything. If she hadn't been skipping school then maybe he would still be here, he wouldn't of gotten depressed, and he wouldn't of killed himself and left them alone.
All the while Eli is there for Rowan. Then Rowan pushes away everyone, she doesn't work she doesn't do anything but wake up and remember everyday that he's gone and he won't be back to pick up his dry cleaning or finish the book he left half read.
Watching the journey Rowan takes is heart-wrenching. She lives in the guilt and sadness for quite a while and then it almost seems like she just starts feeling a little bit better. Her mother though it takes a huge fight with her parents to get her to wake up and realize that she has to live and move on from the guilt she feels.
This book had a ton of ups and downs, more downs than anything. I wasn't expecting it to be as sad as it was. It seemed that everyone that was around Rowan had experienced some sort of loss. Also I wasn't a fan of her friend Nadia and in the end what happens with Nadia is a good thing.
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