Chasing Spring by R.S. Grey Review

4.5 Smooches

Synopsis

I thought I’d left Blackwater, Texas behind for good. I didn’t belong in the small town, but my dad wouldn’t listen. He dragged me back home in his beat-up truck and dropped a bomb along the way: Chase Matthews was moving in with us. He was the golden boy of my high school, my former best friend, and the last person I wanted sleeping across the hall. His presence was too great a reminder of the ghosts I was trying to forget.

I didn’t ask for a hero. I don’t want to be saved.

To me, Lilah Calloway meant late nights sneakin’ out, moonlit hair, and sparklers in July. She was my best friend until the day she left and I’d assumed Blackwater had seen the last of her. Then, like a tempest, she rolled back into town for the final half of senior year. The chopped hair and dark devil-may-care attitude warned most people away, but I knew if I fought hard enough, I could find the lost girl.

I didn’t want to be her hero. Some girls don’t need to be saved.

Review

“Why aren’t you as messed up as I am, Chase? After everything that’s happened?”

I don’t read a ton of YA anymore and now after reading Chasing Spring I am reminded why I have always loved it so much. There is just something about watching people tether the lines between their childhood and becoming adults. RS Grey has written that line beautifully and full of emotion.

‘But Chase had said it best: this was our story and happy endings are few and far between.’

Lilah and Chase were best friends, until her mom dies and she left. Now they are nothing anymore. But Lilah is back in the small town they both call home and circumstances have Chase living with her and her dad. She is determined to avoid him for her senior year before she can get away for good but each moment she is near him that becomes more and more impossible. Both Chase and Lilah have incredibly tragic past involving their mothers who were best friends but each has dealt with it completely differently to the point it is so unclear if the two of them could ever move past it all to become friend again or possibly even more.

‘I’d never asked him to take me to the gray. I was perfectly happy living in the black.’

I have been a huge fan of R.S. Grey’s since I picked up my first book by her and will be honest was apprehensive of this new story. I love her contemporary romantic comedy so when I heard that this was going to be a more serious mature young adult novel dealing with issues such as substance abuse, death and abandonment I was nervous. This could not have been more different but R.S. proved that she is not to be pigeonholed and that she can write the heck out of a more serious topic.

‘I hated how stubbornly I loved Lilah.’

I do want to stress that while I call this mature YA that has more to do with the seriousness of the issues involved and the maturity of the characters than it has to do with sex and any kind of sexual relationship. I am not saying there is not a incredibly strong romance with definite sexual undertones to it, because there is, I just don’t want yo going into this story with the idea that you are going to get more out of it in that area than is intended. But trust me, you don’t need it. The story is strong and the plot dynamic. You will be grabbed from page one and like me you will be so happy you gave this YA book a shot.

~miranda

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