Thank you Net Galley and Jane C. Brady for the free copy of this book in exchange with an honest review.

I was very eager to read this book because it dealt with bullying, which is a matter I'm incredibly into, since it's very relevant and I want to delve into it's causes and it's aftermath as much as I can. I think this book does a very good job of portraying how a victim of bullying navigates high school and how affected by it this person is, even out of school, when he/she is supposedly safe from the harmful comments and the mean behavior.

What impressed me most, was how amazing Jewel's family is. And by amazing I don't mean that they did anything extraordinary, they were simply an ordinary caring family, that only had Jewel's best interests at heart. I think it's important to portray good family models in books, because especially in young adult and contemporary fiction, I rarely see a family that's united and where the kids don't have problems with the parents, etc. It was very refreshing to see Jewel's family interact and I think it promotes a very healthy model of how families should be: close-knit, loving and supporting towards one another.

I had two problems with this book: 1) it was too short and 2) there was some stereotyping of characters and situations. Let me explain what I mean.
By "too short" I mean that I wanted more detail in a lot of stuff and I also wanted some situations explored more thoroughly. For example, we are told that Jewel sings, paints, does horseback riding, but we only read about horseback riding. It was like the other two hobbies were just mentioned to make her more interesting. Also, after a certain event, Jewel and Kaiden said that they wanted to take a more active role in preventing bullying and that they would organise speeches and stuff like that, which never happened and after a few pages the reader just reads that they work they did on that area was very successful. But I wanted to see what they did, I wanted to read about Jewel giving a speech, I wanted more from the book, because in my opinion that would make it more wholesome.
Now to my second point, there were some stereotypes being mentioned and I would love it so so much if they weren't there. For example, the "nerdy" guy had his glasses taped with white tape in the middle, which is such a stereotype for someone that's more studious than most. Why couldn't the "nerdy" guy have piercings? Or be super hot? Don't these people exist? Or the definition of someone who studies a lot and loves science is only what we see in high school movies?

Kaiden and Jewel's relationship was so sweet and not toxic at all and I was very glad for that. It was far from the typical high school romance and Kaiden was exactly what Jewel needed to help her get through another difficult high school year. Kaiden had such a nice and charming personality, even though he himself had been through a lot and I was very happy to see them together, because they fitted each other very good!

All in all, "Cascading Petals" is a very nice book about bullying that can be read in a breeze, as it is very engrossing and has interesting characters. It's a book that I would read again and would recommend to anyone who wants to get glimpse about bullying.