Choosing to read this book was hard, because I knew it was going to devastate me, and I was right. But it was so worth it. This book was just wonderfully beautiful, a deeply sad but honest look at loneliness, love, and grief. Anna and Weston were fully realized people to me, and I recognized pieces of them in both myself and in others that I’ve known. Ashley Schumacher is exceptionally gifted at not only being able to capture the beauty of a first love, but also how someone can feel alone if they are surrounded by people, how finding someone who understands you completely is a special form of magic, and how loss can change us as we try to live with the grief. There’s also an added bonus of this book featuring band kids, a world I saw marginally as a choir kid in high school, and it brings not only a levity to the book but also gives it another way of feeling more like a true story.

I thought I knew this from reading Amelia Unabridged, but Full Flight solidified it: I will gladly let Ashley Schumacher devastate me with any beautiful words she chooses to put into the world!

This book was absolutely devastating. I loved seeing how Weston and Anna found each other and feel in love, but the ending felt horribly sad. I want to know what happens next to Anna and if she ever found her Wes after. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking story, and I loved it. Great book and the author made the characters come alive. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for my free arc in exchange for my honest opinion. Wonderful story!

Thank you so much Wednesday Books for this widget I was over the moon to receive this novel!

5/5 🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵
I loved Amelia Unabridged and I knew this would be no different. Schumacher can reel a reader in, in a matter of seconds with her novels!
There is too much to love in this book. The writing is superb and just outstanding. The pacing was brilliant.
The characters were so dang relatable Anna readers will fall so in love with her. I sure as heck did.
Anna and Weston’s relationship was just beautiful in every way possible. Ahhh! Just lovely.
A book about young adult love, music and grief will just take your breath away.

Such an outstanding novel and I wanted it to last forever. Ashley girl..... You seriously rock!
And I will always love anything you create 😍

Again thank you for this widget Wednesday Books and NetGalley!
I will post to my platforms closer to pub date!
Now I wished I would have held off on reading this one! I might re-read it come January.

I didnt think I could love and Ashley Schumacher book any MORE THAN after Amelia Unabridged.

I WAS WRONG.

I LOVED Full Flight. I dunno how Ms Schumacher weaves her magic while she writes but she just does such a fantastic job of getting the emotional intligence down of her characters they really TRULY feel like honest to God real people.

I think it this point I'm just going to have too put her on auto buy... 🤷‍♀️ What can I say? I'm smitten!

Thank you to Netgalley and publishers for this complimentary arc in exchange for my honest review.

Oh don't mind me, I'm just crying on my lunch break at work because of this book. I knew from the synopsis that it wasn't going to be a sunshine and roses ending, but still. Ugh. I think I liked this book nonetheless? It was a beautiful (albeit somewhat slow moving) ride to the end.

Kindly received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Sometimes I’ve wondered when I’ll find an author who I just get.
Ashley Shumacher is definitely that author.

I’ve also wondered if it’s possible to convey beautiful music through words.

Ashley Shumacher did it.

When books make me cry, I usually can keep breathing normally through my tears.

This book made me sob.


I cannot wait for this to come out next year. I will be waiting for it with my face pressed up against my window. Or I’ll be the first person to enter the store on release day.

Full Flight is a must read


!!So so much thanks to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for this ARC!!

I loved 'Amelia Unabridged' but this one took me a little longer to get into. I love Schumacher's look at first young love and I love experiencing it with them as if I were experiencing it again. I loved the band aspect, being a band nerd myself. It's a story with heartbreak and grief and love. A coming of age story.

Thanks NetGalley for this ARC!

FULL FLIGHT is an utterly gorgeous, compulsively readable story of love, grief, and of course, music. Very rarely in YA contemporary romance does the reader go in with the full knowledge that the love interest (Weston Ryan, here) will be dying at some point of the story.

This leaves the reader on pins and needles throughout the entire experience, as you wait for his death to happen. And while you're waiting for it to happen, you're experiencing this gorgeous love story of two musicians who are learning to love each other, as well as the music they play and the life they're cultivating together.

FULL FLIGHT is utterly gut-wrenching, but gorgeous all the same, and I cannot wait to see what Ashley Schumacher writes next.

Many thanks to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

This book was the kind I have not read in a very long time: beautiful and heartbreaking. I am a regular passenger on the Happing Endings Train these days, so this was an unusual--and emotional--departure from what has become my normal reading fare. But I'm very glad I read it.

Schumacher's writing is lyrical, poetic. Even separated from the story itself, which is well crafted, the prose leaps off the page. I was a little surprised that we got POVs from both Anna and Weston; I'm mixed on whether I like multiple POVs in first person prose, but it worked in this case. Both characters were complex and multifaceted, but I particularly enjoyed Weston's chapters. Seeing his perspective made it hard, in a lot of ways, to understand why he was so mistrusted by the people of Enfield. I'm not familiar with small-town Texas, but is wearing a leather jacket and being quiet really so stigmatizing? I didn't quite get that. Then again, high school was a while ago for me . . .

It was a lovely and thought-provoking book. I will have to go back and read Shumacher's first book.

i knew this would be heartbreaking from the synopsis and i am heartbroken that i was right. beautifully written, emotionally moving, i adore this book (rtc)

I love this author's debut novel, Amelia Unabridged, but I had difficulty getting into this one. There's a ton of marching band lingo that I got hung up in and I didn't relate to the characters as well. I also didn't really see their attraction to each other before they were together. However, Ashley Schumacher is excellent at exploring grief and love.

Ashley?!?!?! What the actual heck? Way to break a girl.
Sigh..... I need to read it again. Those books that make you just finish and then want to jump back in again are my kind of books and this one is high on that list.

Young love is so beautiful to read about. I adore when its real though. When we recognize that these are young adults. They literally are on the cusp of adulthood and this books shows you just that.

The author doesn't sugar coat this for you. You get the beauty and newness of a young love while also recognizing that these young adults are packed with BIG feelings and those aren't always pleasant.

If you are looking to dive into a truly incredible story than you definitely have found it here.

Schumacher's first book "Amelia Unabridged" is still my favorite book of the year and she has become an instant autobuy author for me. Read either of her books and you will know exactly why.

Thank you to Wednesday books and netgalley for the advanced review copy of this book in exchange for my honest feedback. All opinions are my own.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Ugh, how do I give an honest review without spoiling any of this beautiful plot? Full Flight won me over the second I read that it was about band kids in Texas. Although I was never a band kid in high school- I was a theatre kid and the theatre kid/band kid adjacence is real- I knew I would enjoy a love story about two performing arts kids. But what I wasn’t prepared for was Ashley Schumacher‘s gut-wrenching emotion and sincerity with these characters. Full Flight reads like watching your two best friends fall in love with each other, but neither one of them wants to admit it, so you become the omniscient observer to what will be a beautiful love story. Weston and Anna’s love was so pure and earnest the way all first love is, but with a consideration that lets the reader know it was more than just first love. It was two people who truly understood each other. A few criticisms for the book were that Anna and Weston’s relationship moved incredibly quickly. Whether this was intentional or not, I thought the story could have benefitted from more scenes of their relationship developing. Another, the ending felt too rushed. Without giving anything away, I wish we could have seen more of Anna processing what happened and learning how to heal. Criticism aside, this was a wonderful book. I’d recommend it to people who enjoy YA romance and tragic love stories.

Thanks to the publisher for providing an eARC of Full Flight in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to love this so much. I loved Amelia, Unabridged and Ashley Schumacher's writing is still gorgeous here. Plotwise, this should have been the more emotional, impactful of the two. But something about our protagonists always felt more like artful depictions of teenagers as a concept instead of actual depictions of teens. Sometimes that can really work but in this case, for me at least, it made the characters consistently feel fake and impossible to get personally invested in so while a lot happens here that should have been massively impactful, I found myself feeling too distanced to care.

Thank you to St Martin's Press for providing me with an arc via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!

This was a lovely story. Full Flight is a story about your first love, and I enjoyed reading it. As a once upon a time concert and jazz band kid (performing arts school vibes), I liked how music was incorporated into the story. I could definitely relate to that aspect of life and although I never did marching band myself I know how tight-knit those communities are.

Sometimes I felt as though the romance between Weston and Anna moved a little bit too quickly. But, I think that's because they are teenagers and so I can't really discredit or criticize that area of the book since that was probably the intention. I cannot say I expected the book to end the way it did (I was definitely caught off-guard), and I was heartbroken while reading it. The writing was lovely and beautiful, and I would definitely recommend if you like YA romance novels (and wish to cry).

This book was so unbelievably beautiful. If you cry for books, you will be 100% sobbing while reading this. The characters were written so well, I almost felt their emotions with them. Most books can’t be a perfect mix of happy and sad, but this was.

Ashley Schumacher won me over years ago with her Amelia Unabridged and with this new book, she continues to amaze me. With her fleshed out characters, stand out story lines and heartfelt writing, she is an author I count on to give me a good story.

This is a book that will wreck you to the core. I don't want to give any of the plot or romance away, because it is so beautiful that if should be experienced first hand, but just know that once you start, you won't be able to stop.

If you love YA, emotional romance stories and deep characters then definitely pick this one up!

Special thanks to St. Martin's Press & Wednesday Books and Netgalley for sending me the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me with an ARC.
This book is so beautifully heartbreaking. I instantly fell in love with it and could not put it down. The way the author tells the stories of the two main characters and how they come together is stunning. I truly felt a deep connection to them and their experiences. It’s left a huge impact on me.

Anna James is a saxophonist in her high school marching band. She lives in a small Texan town where everyone knows everyone and gossip spreads like wildfire. At the beginning of Junior year Anna is partnered for a duet with Senior Weston Ryan, a boy who everyone thinks is trouble. The two bond over their love for music and discover that there might be someone else who feels as alone as they do. Anna’s overprotective parents warn her not to see Weston, but she begins to lie and sees him in secret. The two are separated when Anna's parents find out about her betrayal and then the unthinkable happens.

This book is a tear jerker! I bawled my eyes out the last quarter of the book. The entire book was bittersweet and the prose is beautiful. The characters were well developed and the first love between Anna and Weston was so pure. I could understand the anger Anna felt when her parents forbid her to see Weston, when they wouldn’t even give him a chance. There is a lot of band talk in the book and having never been in the band I was a little bored by that, but I can understand its importance in the story. It really is beautifully written and I think young adult readers would really enjoy it. It’s kind of reminiscent of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. It has that type of feel to it. The religion talk didn’t bother me. It set the stage for the type of community these kids are growing up in. It didn’t have a “ hit you over the head'' religious vibe, but definitely helps the reader to understand the judgmental attitude of the community. **Trigger warning - Both of the main characters have suicidal thoughts, not in so many words, but it can be felt in the beautiful composition. Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press and Ashley Schumacher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I couldn't put this book down. What a sweet read about two young people finding each other by necessity, experiencing first love, and then heartbreak. Brought together by their musical talent, Anna and Weston find a way to work together to create a duet for the marching band, endure homework struggles, work through life's problems, find ways around overbearing parents and fall in love. Don't they say it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved before? This book will explain to you why that is so. Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.