Normally I’d avoid a novel with a title like this because it's too much pretention, and there were a couple of times reading this that I wondered about the wisdom of continuing, but there was enough to keep my interest and to keep it fresh, and it told a sweet story of two engaging people. It was first person, too, but that wasn't obnoxious. Some authors can carry it, some stories can too, but to find the sweet intersection between those two is not easy.
This author did it successfully, but my objections to first person still apply even here, because there were two other important characters in this novel who were interesting and truly attractive to a reader, yet we didn't get their PoV because it was all Britton all the time. I think the story lost something because of that. Either of these characters could have told their own story because all three perspectives were equally engaging, but three 1PoVs would have ruined it - which begs the question as to why it wasn't told in third. First gear is far too trudging!
So anyway, Britton Walsh is a foster kid who's had the worst of the system: cruelty, abuse, and misery. She's learned to have a hard shell, to not give, to keep herself to herself and her feelings tightly under wraps. Just turned eighteen, she's aiming to finish high school and get free of all of this to start her own life at last. She's spending these last few months in the care of Tom and Cate Cahill who happen to have a daughter only slightly younger than Britton, but whereas Britton is a soft butch lesbian, their daughter, Avery is, at first glance, your standard queen bee cheerleader. She's popular, fashionable, great-looking, and doing well in school.
The idiot book description, evidently always written by some jackass who never read the book, claims Britton is "beginning her senior year with new foster parents in a new city" but that's not true. She's lived in this area all her life. She just happens to be in a new high school. She has a hard time adjusting because she's never had caring parents like Tom and Cate. She was given up by her bio-parents at birth because she had a heart defect. That's long been fixed, but her parents had no interest in her. Tom and Cate do. This makes it all the more difficult that Britton has a crush on Avery. It’s doubly-bad because Avery is hetero as far as Britton knows, and other than being friendly, has no interest in Britton - who Avery knows is queer.
Britton seems to have found an outlet for her urges though, in the form of Spence - Valerie Spencer - who is an out lesbian attending the same school. She and Britton begin hanging out, but Avery warns her foster sister about her new love interest several times. Now Britton is strung between two groups - the misfit crowd who Spence hangs with, and the elite crowd Avery hangs with, trying to navigate new and sometimes rather hostile waters.
I had some minor issues over a couple of aspects of the story. Why the author insisted upon having both the main love interests be eighteen before anything more than kissing occurred is a mystery since the age of consent in Massachusetts is sixteen, not eighteen! Secondly, in light of this, Cate's 'house rules' toward the end were a bit bizarre given that both girls were eighteen at this point. But I was happy to let that slide. It’s no great big deal. Just odd is all.
That said, this story takes interesting and often unexpected paths to its satisfying conclusion and in the end, I really enjoyed it a lot.
