4 stars

The teenage years! How did we ever survive them? How do we raise children to be teenagers who accept responsibility, who realize that life is sometimes fleeting, and understand that there is so much more to life than a game?

The story of the town of Worthy Georgia starts out with triumph following a winning football game and season. The football heroes and their cheerleaders are filled with their sense of self importance, the players being considered demigods and the cheerleaders being linked to them. The town is thrilled because football is part of their intrinsic life producing heroes on the field. However, the sounds of sirens blaring follow shortly after. For three of the cheerleaders, their life ends in a tragic car accident. For one young man his life becomes a nightmare as he is blamed for this awful happening. For the parents, the ones left behind, this tragedy moves and shapes their lives in so many ways. For one young girl, Leah, who was left behind, now wonders why she was not in that car.

There was so much going on in this novel that the author was able to interweave with the death of the three girls. She was able to point up the way in which teenagers think that life is a guarantee. She was able to show that parents sometimes makes choices that are just as foolish as their teenage children make. Sometimes these choices result in consequences that one never seems to think could possibly happen. Sometimes these choices can be fatal.

How does one move beyond this? How do we stop making our sports stars into gods? How does one suffer the loss of a child? How does one learn to look inside oneself to find that from all tragedy there is always hope?

As sad as this novel is, it also offers one hope. It is the concept that life in all its tragic forms will go on and that people will be able to move forward if they recognize that love and hope is there for those who are willing to grasp it.

Thank you to NetGallery and Lake Union Publishing for providing an ARC for an unbiased review.

In a small Southern town, high school football is everything. Locals gather every weekend to cheer on their boys. One night after an awe-inspiring victory, a car crash kills three of the teams cheerleaders. The boy in the other car is immediately blamed in the court of public opinion. The town becomes a battleground as friends become enemies and people take sides about who is to blame. Four people, the mother of on of the dead girls, a cheerleader who should have been in the car, the mother of the boy behind the wheel and a substitute teacher with a shocking secret are at the center of this tumultuous tale. For fans of Jodi Piccoult