This book captures the reader and take you into a world filled with angst and forbidden love. Teenagers on the cusp of adulthood battling with life and relationships. Can Ty and Nandy overcome gunshots wounds, parents, and mixed emotions? I loved this story. It was well developed and I felt right there with them. It is refreshing to read characters that seem so real.

Plot: After experiencing the loss of those he loves, Tyson Trice, is sent to live with a family he knew ten years ago. He doesn't care. He doesn't care about much anymore. But once he is transplanted into the wealthy neighborhood of Pacific Hills he is reunited with his childhood friend, Nandy Smith. But in their decade apart they have become very different people and now they have to figure out a way to live together.

I am so sad that this book just did not work for me. It had everything going for it: beautiful cover, enemies-to-lovers, young adult. However, in spite of all of that, it felt like a chore to finish this.

But I did like several things from this book. Parts of the writing were done well. I loved that the author touched on boys dealing with their emotions, loss, and abuse. I also really enjoyed Trice's character. Learning about his past and watching him grow and heal was done very well. I loved his appreciation for his heritage and sharing that with the Smith's.

However, Nandy is one of the worst characters I have ever read. She is an entitled, little, rich girl and I never really came around to liking her. The reader is told many times that Nandy is actually very sweet and welcoming and incredibly involved in her school and her neighborhood - but we never see that. We only see her whine about things that don't go exactly her way. She does become slightly more tolerable after the first half of the book, but she never lives up to this character she was painted to be. If she has all these amazing qualities, as I reader, I want to see her exhibiting them.

The writing also felt a little inconsistent to me. Several times the author wrote absolutely beautiful paragraphs about race, adoption, and friendships. Then on the same page would have her seventeen year old characters say things like "jump street" or complain about being embarrassed because Trice was having his hair braided outside and her house "ain't the hood."

Plus, the actual plot if the book was unoriginal and pretty bland in a majority of the book. The minor conflicts were incredibly repetitive and the major conflict was just glossed over quickly.

There is also a lot of mentions of religion, but for no real purpose. It doesn't play a real role in the story, but is referenced many times. I kept expecting it to mean something in the end... but, no.

Reading this, I decided the author made a career out of writing hallmark movie channel movies, then visited the mean streets of, say, downtown Bloomington - an adventure which inspired this almost comically uninspired novel. With antiquated slang, one dimensional and unlikable characters with zero motivating factors for any single one of their actions, and an unaccountable length - it's a no from me dawg.