~3.5 stars~

This was a great coming of age book. We have all these different kids who end up finding friendship in the most unlikely places/way. This book is about friendship.

Mattie is an outsider and only has one friend. She’s secretly in love with escapology but wants to do more. She has one friend, Stella, who is going away to a pre-college summer program. Since, she’s going to be alone, she decides to take things into her own hands and really get into escapology. She’s also snarky and I loved that.

Later we meet Frankie, who Stella befriends when she’s away at her pre-college program. I really liked Frankie. He was probably the most awkward but I loved how he just meshed into this group.

Will is your typical high school basketball star who has everything and a beautiful girlfriend. Except, he’s hiding a pretty big secret. He’s living a lie and really starting to unravel.

Mattie decided to go to Miyu and ask her to mentor her about escapology. It starts a bunch of actions that bring all these characters together. Will and Mattie end up making a deal but it blossoms into a friendship. This whole book is about friendship and finding yourself. I loved that there was romance but not between any of the main characters! How refreshing!! There’s a lot of different themes in this book.

Then there’s the story between Miyu and her mother Akiko. Akiko was a famous escapologist, who died at a young age, in a plane crash. Miyu is living in their house but has agoraphobia. I’m sorry but this story just crushed my soul. I don’t know if I’m in the right head space but it brought tears to my eyes. Okay, I’m definitely not in the right head space, I’m on a ton of fertility drugs. Anyways, Miyu has these journal/diary pages that kind of tell the story of her mother and herself. It was one of my favorite parts of this book.

I did have some issues with the book. There are some places where the writing wasn’t the greatest. I actually didn’t care for the dual perspective in this book. It wasn’t really needed. There were times that I would be confused about situations and find out that it was just Mattie dreaming.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and once I got into the book, I couldn’t put it down. It was fun, entertaining, yet tackled some tough issues.

I want to thank Netgalley and Amberjack Publishing for giving me an e-ARC of this book for review.

You can see my review here: Books Are The New Black