Author: Jennifer Echols
Publisher: Simon & Shuster
Rating: WARTY!
Somebody needs to tell Echols to do something about that awful background on her website....
This is an absolutely classic example of how Big Publishing™ will rip up your novel. Vanesa Munoz, the photographer who took the cover picture has never read this book, and that's why she doesn't know that the main character does not have straight fly-away hair, but lush curls and hair so dark that it only looks brown in bright sunlight.
The cover designer Laywan Kwan has several book review bloggers "quoted" on the back cover. Seven out of nine of those quotes are evidently very "creative". The back cover claims that "Chick Loves Lit" says this novel is superb, but if you go to Chick loves Lit's blog and do a search for the word 'superb' in the review of this novel, it comes up with no matches found. In other words, Simon & Shuster is evidently "superb" at creating quotes. Chick Loves lit did like this novel, but 'superb' was not a word used to describe it in the review. I suppose that word could have come from somewhere else, but having struck out at the obvious source, how do we know we can rely on that?
The back cover quotes the blog 'Girls Without a Bookshelf' as saying that this novel is "Searingly sexy", but I can't even find a review of the novel on that blog - unless that blog's search engine doesn't work. The 'smart bitches trashy books' blog has no listing for anything by Echols, yet this back cover blurb claims that blog says that the novel was "edgy, tense, and seductive"! I don't have anything against this particular blog, but personally, I honestly wouldn't want a blog named (in part) "trashy books" being quoted on any of my book covers! The implication ought to explain why. It's a great name for a blog, but it gives entirely the wrong impression when tied so closely to a novel. Another blog, 'Book Loons' doesn't have this novel listed, so that quote is apparently another invention, or again, their search engine sucks.
'YA reads' supposedly said this novel is "Deeply rich", but that appears nowhere in the review. 'Confessions of a Bookaholic' supposedly said this novel was "Unique and captivating" but I can't find any review of this novel on that website either! 'A Good Addiction' purportedly said that the novel is "Emotional and expressive", but this is another quote I cannot find. This is not to say that the blogs I mentioned did not rate this novel positively - only that the back cover blurb in seven out of nine quotes has apparently pulled blog quotes out of somewhere the airplane doesn't fly.
Leah was a mid-teen girl who wanted to fly. She forged her mom's signature on a form and managed to scrabble together sufficient dollars for one lesson. She approached Mr Hall - a flier at the tin-pot little air field near the trailer park where she lives. He ran an air advertising business and gave flying lessons. After her first one, Leah was even more addicted than before, and she had really lucked-out with Hall. He taught her for free after that first lesson, and then one day she strode into the hangar to hear his teen twin sons talking about her - how she must be "doing" their dad to get her flying lessons for free. What charming children he raised.
Now, two years later, she has her license, and is trying to rack up hours so she can become an airline pilot after some flying time and some college, but her world drops into a air-pocket when Hall goes downhill after he learns that his oldest son was killed in Afghanistan. Hall himself dies a month later and Leah thinks that her high life is over. The problem is that it’s not. It’s a problem because Grayson, one of the two remaining boys in the Hall family, has discovered her forged application, and he threatens her that unless she comes to work for him, he will expose her forgery. He also wants her to date his brother.
I found this part to be completely outrageous. Not that Grayson had done it, but that she had fallen for it. Regardless of how she got there, she is now an adult and a qualified pilot, so to hold this juvie "offense" as a threat over her was a pretty weak way of forcing these two together into a farcical 3T (trope teen triangle). Yep, it is. It’s got the bad boy with the absurd name (Grayson); it’s got the clueless young girl (Leah) and it’s got the good guy (Alec).
How Leah even rates Grayson goes way beyond credibility and deeply into the public toilet at the run-down end of the block. Grayson is constantly insulting her and he's blackmailing her. He treats her like dirt. As in,for example, one time when she rolls into work one morning, and Grayson stands watching her talk to her best friend Molly who has just joined the crew. Molly is putting the letters on the banners that fly behind the planes. After a chat, Leah walks over to the hanger where Grayson is still standing watching her, and he orders her to take the truck back over to Molly with a fresh banner. What? He couldn't do it himself instead of standing around? He's a jerk, yet Leah is such a sad excuse for a protagonist that she feels 'the fever' every time he touches her. It’s so pathetic as to be YA romance. That's how bad it is.
Yes, Leah has serious issues. She's a bastard child who might even be Hall's daughter for all I know. He's separated from his wife because of infidelity. Her own mother is a no good piece of trash who dates bad boyfriends and pawns her own TV to pay off her bad boyfriend's debt. She's gone almost the entire time, leaving Leah alone in the trashy trailer where they live next to the air field. Leah can’t drive and can’t afford college, although she seems not to be making any effort to apply to pilot school, or to line-up a scholarship. And now she's dating Alec to keep Grayson happy so she can fly and he won't expose her, and Molly is kind-of dating Grayson, although not really.
So this book finally went into meltdown for me around page 200 when Alec, Grayson, Leah, and Molly went to a party, and ex-boyfriend Mark plays the Neanderthal with Leah, pulling her into his truck for a talk, which she's fine with, and then Grayson plays the Neanderthal and comes barreling in to drag her ass out of the truck. They both treat Leah like she's a possession, and she has no problem with this at all. That alone rates this novel as majorly warty.
After this treatment, Leah spends the night in a storm shelter at the airport with Grayson and is more than ready to make out with this macho man who made her his possession. In short, she's as pathetic as they come and I am done with this trash. You'd be better off listening to Jennifer Eccles by The Hollies than reading Jennifer Echols.
