What should have been a skeezy story ended up being kind of cute. Rating: 3/5

*This is book #3/28 for my 2014 book challenge. You can take a look at the reading challenge here.

When Hanley Helton discovers a boy living in her garage, she knows she should kick him out. But Nate is too charming to be dangerous. He just needs a place to get away, which Hanley understands. Her own escape methods (vodka, black hair dye, and pretending the past didn’t happen) are more traditional, but who is she to judge?

Nate doesn’t tell her why he’s in her garage, and she doesn’t tell him what she’s running from. Soon, Hanley’s trading her late-night escapades for all-night conversations and stolen kisses. But when Nate’s recognized as the missing teen from the news, Hanley isn’t sure which is worse: that she’s harboring a fugitive, or that she’s in love with one.

This is one of those generic contemporary YA fiction novels. There’s not a lot of substance to it, even though it does attempt to be more than superficial. It’s one of those stories where you need to kind of throw away common sense to enjoy it. Hanley finds a man (though an attractive, only slightly older one) sleeping in her garage. While she’s weirded out at first, she can’t get over how attractive he is so she decides he can stay. Plus he bought her a necklace. They have like, this deep unspoken understanding of each other because they’ve both been through things. Duh. I mean, Hanley has black hair now and likes to get drunk and there’s a dude in her garage that has enough money to buy her a necklace so clearly they both have demons. …. ….. …. Yeah. It’s one of those stories. On the outside it’s incredibly superficial in that if he wasn’t attractive she probably wouldn’t be about it.

While it’s superficial on the outside, it’s kind of meant to be. Hanley creates a superficial relationship with almost everyone in her life because she got close to someone once and it ended badly. (Spoiler: that’s code word for death). While half of me didn’t was annoyed, the other half of me was really happy about how the story played out. There was a little bit of mystery, there was a story that we learned slowly (I’m a sucker for that!) and underneath the superficiality were some very real characters with real motives and real development.

It’s a quick read, with enough cliffhangers that I wanted to keep reading and didn’t want to put it down. It touches briefly on some dark subjects (suicide, cancer, etc) but not so much that I would be worried about it as a trigger.

Rating: 

If you’re interested in reading my GoodReads updates from this book you can do so here. I must say, they’re quite entertaining. It will tell you exactly what I was thinking on certain pages.

Note: I received a free ebook version of this book through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions held within this review are my own thoughts and feelings and do not reflect upon anyone else.

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