EMMY & OLIVER

SUMMARY

Emmy and Oliver were going to be best friends forever, or maybe even more, before their futures were ripped apart. In Emmy’s soul, despite the space and time between them, their connection has never been severed. But is their story still written in the stars? Or are their hearts like the pieces of two different puzzles—impossible to fit together?

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Emmy just wants to be in charge of her own life. . . . She wants to stay out late, surf her favorite beach—go anywhere without her parents’ relentless worrying. But Emmy’s parents can’t seem to let her grow up—not since the day Oliver disappeared.

Oliver needs a moment to figure out his heart. . . . He’d thought, all these years, that his dad was the good guy. He never knew that it was his father who had kidnapped him and kept him on the run. Discovering it, and finding himself returned to his old hometown, all at once, has his heart racing, and his thoughts swirling.

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Readers who love Sarah Dessen will devour these pages with hearts in throats as Emmy and Oliver struggle to face the messy, confusing consequences of Oliver’s father’s crime. Full of romance, coming-of-age emotion, and heartache, these two equally compelling characters create an unforgettable story.

~ Amazon

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OPINION

I really liked this book. I’m a sucker for YA romance and coming of age stories. And reading this story was like sitting down with Emmy and catching up as old friends.

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As the summary states, Emmy and Oliver were destined to friends, but then Oliver is taken away from everyone and is kidnapped by his dad and they move away. Of course, this hurts Oliver’s mom Maureen and it sends her in a frenzy to try to find her son, and after ten years, he finally comes home. Emmy and her two best friends get their friend back, and life can go on as usually. Right?

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Wrong!

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There’s no going back. There’s only going forward, but even going forward gets to be a little tough. Oliver’s disappearance didn’t just change Maureen. When Oliver was kidnapped, it set off a bomb, and everyone within its radius was hurt by it.

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Emmy’s parents panicked and become overprotective parents, clinging to their daughter because they were afraid they would lose her too. They saw the pain that Maureen was going through and didn’t want to experience it. Of course, their excuse was that they were protecting their daughter, but all children grow up, and chaining their kid to them isn’t going to help anything.

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So, living under their roof, Emmy has had to lie and keep secrets from her parents. She fell in love with surfing but she knew if her parents knew about it, they would never let her pursue something she loved because they didn’t want her to get hurt. Her parents even planned on having her stay home after high school and go to community college for two years and make some money, but they never asked what Emmy wanted. And what she wanted was to go to a 4-year university, join a surf team, and grow up. So, with these secrets hanging in the air, they were bound to be found out, and the tension trickled throughout the pages until it finally blew up.

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As for Oliver, things aren’t exactly going well with being back with him mom. He’s just spent the last 10 years with his dad, thinking that his mom left THEM, but the truth came out that his father actually took him, and Oliver found a way to get back to his mom, but in result, his dad disappeared. But now, being back with his mom, things are a bit different. His mom has remarried and has two twin girls. Everything she had been feeling over the years didn’t just go away, and Maureen tries to cling onto Oliver, afraid that he’ll be taken away from her again. But life needs to move on, so Oliver starts going to school, is a little pushed to hang out once again with Emmy and then her best friends, and to try to move on. But its not easy, and I love how Emmy encourages Oliver to talk with him mom, to try to explain how he’s feeling, and I love how Oliver was able to see Emmy as someone he can talk to.

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Now, this can’t be a YA romance without the romance! Emmy and Oliver are reunited! And after some awkward conversations, a surfing lesson to which Oliver sucks at, a lot of time to talk and connect, and a make out session at a party, these two are finally following their destiny of being together. These two are TOO CUTE! Sneaking kisses between Maureen’s many back and forth trips to the laundry to check up on them, laying out on the beach cuddling, hanging out on the swings in his backyard, eating together at lunch. I’ve shipped them since the very first chapter and have been cheering them on!

 

There’s wasn’t anything bad that I found in this book, nothing that I didn’t like or was bored to read. It held my interest through the chapters, I loved the characters, the complicated and good relationship Emmy had with her parents, the conflict, the tension, the friendships, and Emmy and Oliver.

This is one story I’ll probably pick up and read again.