Maddie's Books

Some books just do it for you and there's no specific reason why. Saving June was like that for me. This book probably only deserves four stars, as there were some problems I could find with it, but despite all of that I still really enjoyed it and wouldn't be happy with myself if I gave it less than five. The plot was good, the characters were all fairly likable, and there were a lot of amazing quotes. A lot.

I suppose this is another book I could have been biased towards before reading. I love it when an author brings music or some other form of real art (not simply made up for the sake of the story) into their books. So, Jake's love of music was awesome. Also, I'm a sucker when it comes to road trip stories. I don't know why, but I find them interesting. Probably because settings can get boring and road trips tend to keep the plot going at a steady pace. So, those two things alone made me enjoy the book. Like I said, the characters were enjoyable too. I loved Laney and Jake grew on me as I read. Harper and I had our off and on moments, but I can probably only count on one or two hands the number of protagonists that I've actually completely liked when reading a novel. The plot itself was also good. I've read plenty of books about the aftermath of suicide, but this was one of my favorites. Harrington did a good job of adding details about June without making it go so overboard that I was sick of hearing about her. All in all, it flowed well and stayed decently believable. And there were so many great quotes. That's a huge plus for me.

As for cons, there were some, but they didn't necessarily take away from the book in my opinion. I never fully grasped Harper's personality, because it seemed to change from time to time. The book started off a bit slow, too. Some parts of the first half seemed cliched to me- the deadbeat mother and crazy aunt, the old music (which, don't get me wrong, I loved) mixed with attending riots and ranting about the atrocity of the world, etc. But, that was probably just my picky side coming out. And then you have the technicality that it would probably be hard for two underage girls to make it through a road trip with a random boy they just met and hardly any consequences. Though, the author did as good of a job as she could at making it seem fairly possible. These were really the only big problems I could think of and they still didn't bother me very much.

In the end, I just really enjoyed this book. It was raw and held great emotion. I liked the romance and the depiction of teenage life- it was realistic and not overly OR under exaggerated. I liked that it wasn't censored just because it was a YA novel. The settings were good, too. Again, the author was very good at balancing Saving June. She never went into too much detail, but still described enough that I knew what was going on. I loved the hotels and the drives and the few minor characters we met. My favorite thing of all was still the quotes, though. There were a lot that completely summed up my emotions and hit me right in the gut. The small twist in the end kind of annoyed me, but I got over it. Some people might like it a lot. Either way, it was a wonderful book and I would recommend it to anyone- it's a roller coaster that left me pleasantly surprised and wishing there was more.