The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

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Publication date: 2015
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 373
My rating: 4 stars
Ages: 14+

At the start of her junior year, Paige has decided that she no longer wants to the The Girl Whose Boyfriend Drowned. She's had it with the pitying looks and the grief. So she makes a plan—she's going to take part in the high school experience, including dating Ryan Chase, the boy she's had a crush on forever and who just happened to break up with his girlfriend. Not everything goes as planned and Paige's grief just won't disappear.

I am just as much in awe at this book as I was with Lord's debut novel. They come across seeming so much like every other teen romance novel, but the depth and the issues that are explored make them more. The characters are all multidimensional, something that a lot of novels—of all sorts—seem to forget about; the best friends are bland and the minor "background" characters all seem the same. But in Me and You, the reader is presented with believable, complicated characters and relationships.  The one character who seemed the least developed was Paige's sister, who rarely seems to be around.

Throughout the year that we go through with Paige, we see her relationship with her sister, parents, grandmother, friends, schoolmates, and herself. We see her as she deals with death, sickness, betrayal, and forgiveness. And then we get to be with her as she discovers (as we all do) that life doesn't follow the plans we had, but that usually means that it's better than we could have imagined.

I wanted more of a Christmas scene, but that's probably just because I was reading it around Christmas and I just wanted everything to be about the holiday.

No sexual situations and only one swear.

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