Author: Emery Lord
Published: April 15, 2014
Hardcover, 352 pages
5 Gold Stars
(summary from Goodreads)
After breaking up with her bad-news boyfriend, Reagan O’Neill is ready to leave her rebellious ways behind. . . and her best friend, country superstar Lilah Montgomery, is nursing a broken heart of her own. Fortunately, Lilah’s 24-city tour is about to kick off, offering a perfect opportunity for a girls-only summer of break-up ballads and healing hearts. But when Matt Finch joins the tour as its opening act, his boy-next-door charm proves difficult for Reagan to resist, despite her vow to live a drama-free existence. This summer, Reagan and Lilah will navigate the ups and downs of fame and friendship as they come to see that giving your heart to the right person is always a risk worth taking. A fresh new voice in contemporary romance, Emery Lord’s gorgeous writing hits all the right notes.
From the beginning I knew this would be different from any other break up book I've read. Reagan was dating a bad boy but after what happened with him, she no longer wants to be any sort of the the girl she was before. So she goes on tour with her country superstar best friend Lilah, who's just gotten her heart broken as well. The two of them plan for the most epic summer possible, just the two of them on the road and making their friendship stronger. Reagan doesn't plan on meeting any guys and she certainly doesn't plan for Matt Finch, Lilah's new opening act who's suddenly on tour with them. While Lilah struggles to move on from her long time love while dodging paparazzi and rumours, Reagan is trying to keep her heart in tact while spending more time with Matt. It's not so easy for the two girls who were just planning on being along together, it's amazing how quickly things can change.
Reagan is my favourite kind of girl. She's got some badass ways but she's trying to get better. She used to smoke, drink and get into trouble, but now that the jerk who got her doing those things is gone, she's trying to start anew. Lilah, or Dee as she goes by to her friends, is trying to figure out who she is without her high school boyfriend, but she has to do it in the public eye. When her publicist suggests she pretends to date Matt, it makes everything more complicated for Reagan. These two are the perfect best friends though. They understand each other and even when everything gets between them, they still find a way to snuggle up and eat ice cream together. This is the sweetest story about a pair of best friends going through the same thing but taking it completely different. It's about becoming who you really are and being able to show that person to the world. Reagan wants to be able to show it to Matt and Lilah wants to show it to her fans.
I love that the chapters followed the tour, each one telling us where in the states they were. We followed the girls as they went from Nashville to California to Charlotte and watched as they tried to live in between. This book showed true friendship and I loved the moments Reagan and Dee spent together. Nothing is easy in life, even if your rich and famous, but Dee never let that get to her head. She only cared about being with the one she loved and Reagan soon realized this the closer she got to Matt. This was the perfect mix of friendship and romance, of loss and love, and of figuring out your life while trying to swim through it. A great new contemporary from a new author, I'm sure Lord will become a hit in the YA genre and I can't wait to read what she has next.
“This is the currency of friendship, traded over years and miles, and I hope it's an even exchange someday. For now, I do what all best friends do when there's nothing left to say. We lie together in all the darkness, shoulder to shoulder, and wait for the worst to be over.”
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