after the kiss

Author: Terra Elan McVoy

Summary: (back cover) This moment changes everything.

Becca has been head over heels for Alec from the instant they met. He's a brainy jock with a poet's heart--in other words, perfect for her.

Camille is careful with her words and protective of her heart, especially since Chicago. Then a new boy in her new town catches her off guard with a surprise kiss.

Too bad that new boy is Becca's boyfriend, Alec.

Camille and Becca have never met, but their lives will unravel and interwine in surprising ways as they deal with what happens after the kiss.

Review: This book is told from two different points of view and that made it a bit hard to get into it at first. One of the girls, "speaks" in free verse with lines and stanzas while the other's is in more paragraphs. At the start, it was difficult to find their voices and differentiate the characters, but I'm really glad I got to read it.

The aftermath of a break-up can be very hard to go through depending on how serious the relationship was. But what I liked about this book was that even the cheater was hurt and it wasn't exactly because he was a player that things happened.

Becca was kind of annoying at first with her clingy personality and isolation of her mother. She grew up though and it was in a realistic whole way that I could see truly happening. Camille learned to take risks instead of pushing everyone away and feeling superior to the people around her.

This was definitely a good growing-up kind of book and although the premise may seem superficial, I still took something from it that was very real.

Rating: 1 2 3 3.5 4 5

I can't give it a four because four means I loved it and although I really liked it, the beginning was difficult and it was pretty predictable in some ways. This is the kind of book that keeps you mesmerized while you are actually reading it, but as soon as you put it down, you may not be dying to go back to it immediately. I still enjoyed it very much in the second half where things started falling into place and the characters felt more alive. Verse is hard to write and read because it can be a wall to being one with the characters, but the author did a good job overall.