Kelly Risser

My ears pounded with the tidal beat, and I began to hear voices speaking in the rhythm—jump in, go now, come to us, we’re waiting. Was I losing my mind? Panicked, I looked at David. He watched me carefully. “You hear them.” He nodded to the sea. “Yes,” I said. Then, “Who are they?” “They are us. We are them. You will meet them in time, but it’s best that you try to ignore them for now.” He reached for my hand. “They will grow more persistent.”

It is Meara's senior show more year in high school in Wisconsin and she is looking forward to traveling in Europe with her best friend Kim after graduation, but her mother is very sick and moves them to the small town of Peggy's Cove, Canada, to stay with the grandparents Meara has never met.

While living in Canada is different, the ocean strangely makes Meara feel at home. Her dreams of her father, David, become reality and she finds it strange that he has never aged and skirts around her questions about why he abandoned her and her mother seventeen years ago. Can she handle the truth and live with the most difficult decision of her life?

Told in Meara's voice, the topics are momentous and Meara's loving relationship with her mother is very realistic and heartbreaking. The hardships and difficult decisions Meara make are a lot for a young woman of her age to endure, but she tackles them with maturity and grace. The relationships with her grandparents, her father, her best friend, Kim, and Evan, her boyfriend, are such an important part of her life experience and Ms. Risser pens it with depth and finesse.

I highly recommend this young adult paranormal romance which tackles the serious topics of abandonment and cancer as well as single parenting. I look forward to reading the series.

Thank you to Ms. Risser for giving me the opportunity to read this book with no expectation of a positive review. show less

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. - Anatole France

How can one day go so very wrong? One minute Meara Quinn is making plans for how she will spend the Summer before her senior year and the next she's finding out that her mother's cancer has returned and they are moving away from the only home she's ever known.

Now she is in a new country, taking care of her show more mother, living with grandparents she never met, meeting new friends at school and a guy she really likes and having weird visions of a father who was absent her entire life. There is a secret of who Meara is, and everyone seems to know this except her.

Meara is determined to find out the secrets that will change her life forever.

Review:

The beginning of this book in unbelievably good! Amazing intro and perfect character development. I loved how you could feel with Meara all the time, and go through with her while she leans about her mum's sickness and the movement to another country. It is very realistically described, and we manage to see this all through the eyes of a troubled teenager. And the descriptions of the scenes? Ahhh, just see for yourselves:

The room was a deep purple and accented with an eclectic blend of antiques and comfortable furnishings. It was the kind of room that made a person long to grab a book and cozy into the oversized couch for a several hours.

Thought, sometimes, there would be things that didn't make sense to me:

The guy who delivered the pizza forgot plates and napkins. So, we just opened the box and dug in.

Which delivery place on Earth, for God's sake, delivers plates and napkins? Is this an American thing? If I order pizza, I expect to dig into it with all my fingers, get really messy, and then lick them in the end. Just saying…

There were many twists and turns, mostly little ones in this first book, but the middle of the book gets really slow paced. For a moment, I thought this might be an unpleasant read, but it turned out to just be a calm before the storm, where the biggest twist happens right before the end, and it leaves us wanting more - therefore, the second book. Nicely done, Kelly Risser, nicely done!

Meara is an amazing girl, and we follow her story. She finds out her mum's cancer is back again, and they have to move from USA to Canada. For a teenage girl, that is a huge change. I loved the way she coped with it, even though, at the beginning she made me quite agitated - her mum is dying, and her thought are - life is unfair, why do I have to move to another country, and change schools and lose my friends? It made me incredibly angry, but as much as I don't want to admit it, those are the exact thoughts a teen would have in such moments. We don’t really tend to think about how our parents feel until we get older and wiser, do we?

I liked Meara, apart her irritating personality at times. She is a typical teenage girl, and many girls, me included, can relate to her so well! She is a good person, and she cares about the people around her.

I loved Evan - he is just the sweetest person / boyfriend a girl can have. I honestly wish I had a boyfriend like him when I was 13-years-old. He made sandwiches, and they watched a movie in the car because it was raining, and he would come to Meara's house with flowers, and offer to help out with the chores? He is the cutest person ever.

He was about six foot tall with wavy, black hair that curled over his ears. Tanned skin, lean muscles, and strong hands that ended in long, graceful fingers.

But then, there is Kieran… I know he is the bad boy, but I might be able to ship him and Meara together - maybe? We'll see… It's an unpopular opinion, but I actually want to see them together. Even though Evan is just the sweetest thing, and it would be horrible if Meara broke his heart.

I really enjoyed this book - maybe I enjoyed it the most from all the other Young-Adult paranormal books I've read. It was a great first beginning to a series, and I can't wait to dig in the rest of the series.

As a finale - I had to also include this quote from the book:

Humans are spiteful creatures. They destroy more than they create. That is why I do not associate with them. show less

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All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. - Anatole France

How can one day go so very wrong? One minute Meara Quinn is making plans for how she will spend the Summer before her senior year and the next she's finding out that her mother's cancer has returned and they are moving away from the only home she's ever known.
show more
Now she is in a new country, taking care of her mother, living with grandparents she never met, meeting new friends at school and a guy she really likes and having weird visions of a father who was absent her entire life. There is a secret of who Meara is, and everyone seems to know this except her.

Meara is determined to find out the secrets that will change her life forever.

Review:

The beginning of this book in unbelievably good! Amazing intro and perfect character development. I loved how you could feel with Meara all the time, and go through with her while she leans about her mum's sickness and the movement to another country. It is very realistically described, and we manage to see this all through the eyes of a troubled teenager. And the descriptions of the scenes? Ahhh, just see for yourselves:

The room was a deep purple and accented with an eclectic blend of antiques and comfortable furnishings. It was the kind of room that made a person long to grab a book and cozy into the oversized couch for a several hours.

Thought, sometimes, there would be things that didn't make sense to me:

The guy who delivered the pizza forgot plates and napkins. So, we just opened the box and dug in.

Which delivery place on Earth, for God's sake, delivers plates and napkins? Is this an American thing? If I order pizza, I expect to dig into it with all my fingers, get really messy, and then lick them in the end. Just saying…

There were many twists and turns, mostly little ones in this first book, but the middle of the book gets really slow paced. For a moment, I thought this might be an unpleasant read, but it turned out to just be a calm before the storm, where the biggest twist happens right before the end, and it leaves us wanting more - therefore, the second book. Nicely done, Kelly Risser, nicely done!

Meara is an amazing girl, and we follow her story. She finds out her mum's cancer is back again, and they have to move from USA to Canada. For a teenage girl, that is a huge change. I loved the way she coped with it, even though, at the beginning she made me quite agitated - her mum is dying, and her thought are - life is unfair, why do I have to move to another country, and change schools and lose my friends? It made me incredibly angry, but as much as I don't want to admit it, those are the exact thoughts a teen would have in such moments. We don’t really tend to think about how our parents feel until we get older and wiser, do we?

I liked Meara, apart her irritating personality at times. She is a typical teenage girl, and many girls, me included, can relate to her so well! She is a good person, and she cares about the people around her.

I loved Evan - he is just the sweetest person / boyfriend a girl can have. I honestly wish I had a boyfriend like him when I was 13-years-old. He made sandwiches, and they watched a movie in the car because it was raining, and he would come to Meara's house with flowers, and offer to help out with the chores? He is the cutest person ever.

He was about six foot tall with wavy, black hair that curled over his ears. Tanned skin, lean muscles, and strong hands that ended in long, graceful fingers.

But then, there is Kieran… I know he is the bad boy, but I might be able to ship him and Meara together - maybe? We'll see… It's an unpopular opinion, but I actually want to see them together. Even though Evan is just the sweetest thing, and it would be horrible if Meara broke his heart.

I really enjoyed this book - maybe I enjoyed it the most from all the other Young-Adult paranormal books I've read. It was a great first beginning to a series, and I can't wait to dig in the rest of the series.

As a finale - I had to also include this quote from the book:

Humans are spiteful creatures. They destroy more than they create. That is why I do not associate with them.

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I thought that this was surprisingly good read. I was expecting some explicit sex scenes because the setting is in Italy and a lot of international romance novels tend to be filled with drinking and sex. (Warning: There is quite a bit of drinking.)

The story opens up in a restaurant where Ani is out celebrating with friends. In the upper scale restaurant, she sees her boyfriend/college professor out with another woman---who turns out to be his wife. It's quite a shock for her. She had been show more given the impression that he was a bachelor.

Moving on--she goes to Italy and meets two men who both adore her. What's a girl to do? Ani really isn't in a position to "trust" men right now. In a sense, I feel that she's still reeling from her heartbreak. But she's willing to "have fun" because she's only going to be there for a short time. The memories of an international romance or two may be just the thing she needs.... show less