Monday, January 5, 2015

Review: Bully (Fall Away #1) by Penelope Douglas

My name is Tate. He doesn't call me that, though. He would never refer to me so informally, if he referred to me at all. No, he'll barely even speak to me.

But he still won't leave me alone.

We were best friends once. Then he turned on me and made it his mission to ruin my life. I've been humiliated, shut out, and gossiped about all through high school. His pranks and rumors got more sadistic as time wore on, and I made myself sick trying to stay out of his way. I even went to France for a year, just to avoid him.

But I'm done hiding from him now, and there's no way in hell I'll allow him to ruin my senior year. He might not have changed, but I have. It's time to fight back.

I'm not going to let him bully me anymore.



 



This is my first 5-star book this year and it was a super good one! I had first heard about this book a couple of years ago and it sounded awesome so I immediately put it on my To Be Read list. Unfortunately, when that list has about 700 books on it ... well ... things get lost in the mix. The other day, I saw one of my friends reading it and I put down what I was reading (which is super heavy and sad) and dove into this one. I sure am glad that I did!!

I've never read anything by Penelope Douglas before but I will most certainly read things by her in the future. She's one of my new favorite authors!!! Let's see ... why is she one of my new favorites? Because she writes a character that loves Seether, which happens to be one of my absolute favorite bands, EVER. She also writes a character that loves Die Hard and I adore those movies - I could watch them over and over and never tire of them. And most importantly, she writes characters so realistic that I feel like they are my close friends.

Speaking of characters, I really enjoyed watching the transformation that Tate and Jared went through in this novel. Getting to watch each of them grow individually and then towards and away from each other was just mesmerizing. I really couldn't get enough of it. Maybe that's why I blew through this novel in less than a day. Back to the characters ... they were deep. And by deep, I mean that they were really full and realistic characters ... you discover the back story and why they are the way that they are but it doesn't just get all thrown at you in the first couple of pages. You learn it as the story progresses and I've never really found a New Adult novel that is this in depth while keeping things interesting and not bogging you down with useless information.

The whole premise of the story was pretty interesting ... a girl and guy are close friends until one summer and then things change and the boy makes the girl's life a living hell. Reading the back and forth between Tate and Jared was entertaining and heart wrenching at the same time. You wanted to root for them but you didn't know if you should because was he bullying her? Was she bullying him? It was hard to figure out who was doing what and it made you read that much faster just so you could find out what was going to happen next.

I loved this one and while I want to dive right into the next book, I have other things that I should read. But I don't want to. I'll be getting back to this series soon to see if the others stack up to this one and I really hope that I'm not disappointed. Maybe I should just read this one again right now. It was that good!





No comments:

Post a Comment