After Math

After Math by Denise Grover Swank
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book surprised me. It was a freebie, not well known and my expectations were low. I find that NA romances are so common that it becomes hit and miss to find the gems. But this one is definitely one of them gems.

The standard NA novel usually has either a positive, fairytale tone or a dark, gritty tone. This had a nice mix of both, which was the biggest surprise of all because you'd think it wouldn't work. But it really does. It is the story of Scarlett, who turned out to be somewhat of a contradiction for me. She grew up in a trailer park with an alcoholic mom, expected to follow in both her mother's and sister's footsteps and be pregnant by age 16. She saw a way out when she discovered how much she loves math. This led to a scholarship and prospects for a far better life. You'd expect this to be a girl who's confident and outgoing.

So the first surprise for me - she's not confident at all. Rather, she struggles with panic attacks and an anxiety disorder. She does math to calm herself down, which, when you think about it, makes sense. It's numbers and logic and equations with set answers that follow order. When panic overwhelms you, it only follows that structure would be calming.

Scarlett is kind of blackmailed into tutoring the campus boy-who-likes-to-play, Tucker Price. He's a soccer star and general screw-up who's partied himself into academic probation and a possible loss of his soccer scholarship. He's a pretty self-absorbed jerk. No surprise there.

But Scarlett sees a connection with him and as corny as that sounds, it works. Their relationship grows slowly and ends up being a pretty good story.

The next surprise for me was how smart this book was. The story could be entirely cliche and predictable and while the plot is predictable, the writing that gets you there is not. The dialogue is witty without trying too hard. At one point Scarlett may be helping a very drunk Tucker back home, but I didn't expect that he'd puke along the way. Somehow that seemed out of place in this kind of story and yet not out of place in context - novels like this may be gritty, but this one just had a tone that led me to believe that things wouldn't get quite that realistic. A swoon-worthy guy isn't usually seen puking his guts out along a sidewalk.

Another surprise was the romance. It didn't get overly graphic as these sorts of novels go. But that's just it - it didn't need to get overly graphic in order to tell the story. That's not to say that there weren't "sexy times," because there were. But they weren't really a play-by-play, and here that was smart storytelling.

The epilogue is pretty standard in that it sets up the next book in the series. But again, it isn't overly indulgent. It might be cliche but at least it's tempered. And it is a nice setup for one of the side characters without giving everything away.

I'm impressed. It's not often you find a NA author showing some restraint and telling a story you expect in an unexpected way. The best thing a book can do for me is surprise me and this one did just that. Some might see this as lacking depth; I just found it refreshing. I hope the next book in the series is told as well as this one was.



View all my reviews