5 Smooches!
Synopsis
Kensington Worth had a vision for her senior year. It involved her best friends, her posh private school in downtown Chicago and time alone with her piano until her audition was perfected, a guaranteed ticket into the best music programs in the world.
Instead, a nightmare took over.
It didn’t happen all at once, but her life unraveled quickly—a tiny thread that evil somehow kept pulling until everything precious was taken from her. She was suddenly living miles away from her old life, trapped in an existence she didn’t choose—one determined to destroy her from the inside, leaving only hate and anger behind. It didn’t help that her neighbor, the one whose eyes held danger, was enjoying every second of her fall.
Owen Harper was trouble, his heart wild and his past the kind that’s spoken about in whispers. And somehow, his path was always intertwined with Kensington’s, every interaction crushing her, ruining her hope for any future better than hernow. Sometimes, though, what everyone warns is trouble, is exactly what the heart needs. Owen Harper was consumed with darkness, and it held onto his soul for years. When Kensington looked at him, she saw a boy who’d gotten good at taking others down when they threatened his carefully balanced life. But the more she looked, the more she saw other things too—good things…things to admire.
Things…to love. Things that made her want to be reckless.
And those things…they were the scariest of all.
Review
After having stayed up until 2am reading Wild Reckless, I now fear a book hangover is on the horizon. I’ve never had a book shred my emotions to smithereens so easily before, twist my insides in turmoil, hurt my cheeks from smiling and have my eyes watering like I sliced a dozen onions open. It may be aimed at the YA crowd but as a twenty-nine year old mum of two I can completely appreciate this book for the epic emotional journey it was. I was just blown away by it. It centres around Chicago transplant Kensi who is forced to move to a new town where her next door neighbour happens to be the town hoodlum Owen Harper, a boy with a deeply troubled and tragic past. It’s very much Owen’s anger and confusion that gets him noticed by the spirited and charming young girl living in the house next to his, her ability to see beneath the attitude and detect that there is something more to the infamous middle Harper boy that ultimately begins a stunning transition from enemies to friends.
These two characters are the reason this book comes to life, grabs you by your beating heart and pulverises it with hurt, bitterness, hope and love and every other type of emotion you can think of. It’s like being a teenager again and going through that wide spectrum of feelings and mixed up thoughts. Although Owen and Kensi are only high school kids, the burdens and issues they’re dealing with on a constant basis are unfathomable even for the likes of you or me and somehow that makes their young age incomprehensible whilst elevating their maturity levels. The weight of the world is on them and the world is also so quick to judge them. Ginger Scott has unleashed the full weight of her writing talent into this novel. The characterisation is perfection in every way imaginable, from the way she allows Owen and Kensi to grow and conquer and fight and love and make mistakes but balancing it all out by adding this great sense of realism in all that happens around them, even in the midst of chaos they can be compassionate and loving and funny and studious.
‘And I’m afraid I’m losing myself to danger- the worst kind, the kind that rules your heart.
I’m falling for Owen Harper, and I’m afraid he’s going to die”
The storyline is fairly heart-breaking and the prologue involving Owen had me in tears before the first chapter even began but with a truly remarkable heroine in Kensi, a girl who perseveres when the chips are down and it looks like all is lost, who can stand her ground when she’s fighting for what she believes is right and with Owen and his courageous will to battle on through the hard times and learn to trust the one person who might actually be his salvation this story literally stayed with me hours after reading it. I kept thinking about it in work, when making dinner, when I was doing laundry, just snippets of it reappeared in my brain or something one of the characters did or said.
It’s been awhile since a book has affected me this much, so for that I am eternally grateful to Ginger Scott and her incredibly well plotted story and ingenious characterisation talents. If I could, I would give Wild Reckless a whole sky full of stars rather than five paltry ones.
~Nicole
