I'll Meet You There

Shit damn f***. This book destroyed me. I wasn't expecting it at all. I placed a request through the library system and didn't really have any high expectations. Wow was I wrong. I started this book around 4:00 PM on a Monday and finished it around 6:30 PM the next day. It was a whirlwind and it consumed me and my attention. It blind sighted me.

There was something about the way the language worked that felt so, so real. Sky's voice, both narrative and spoken out loud, was so natural. The conversations with her friends and with Josh, with everyone, felt like it was taken out of the mouths of me and my friends. I felt like I lived in her world in a way that felt so authentic and immersive that it reminded me of Hazel's narration in The show more Fault in Our Stars.

Sky and Josh's love was so angsty but god it was worth it. Again, I felt like I lived with the characters, like I was right there with them, a fly on the wall, and it was a fu**ing privilege to witness. It wasn't your typical YA "swoon" romance though there were definitely parts that made me put the book down and say, Damn. Daaamn.

Josh, too, his interior monologue fully characterized him in a way that I felt like I knew him.

These characters, they refused sympathy and feeling sorry for themselves. Together they were strong. Together they made it. It was beautiful and real and goddamn, they live with me still long after I closed the cover and thought about how much that book ruined me. show less

This young adult novel contains the best account of PTSD I have read in any novel, whether for teens or adults.

Nineteen-year-old Josh Marshall is a “wounded warrior” in both the physical and mental sense. When he returns home to Creek View in Central California after a stint in Afghanistan where he lost a leg and his best friend, he resumes work at the Paradise Motel, a seedy place that becomes more of a home than his “real” home.

Skylar Evans, seventeen, also works at the motel, where she mostly spends time making art collages and dreaming about escaping Creek View to study art at San Francisco State in the fall. But her less-than-functional mother lost her job and stays in bed all day, and Skylar sees her dreams going up in show more smoke.

Both of them had been so desperate to escape Creek View (just a trailer park, a few run-down houses, and a couple of businesses). At Josh’s welcome-home party, Skylar observed:

“Pot and cigarette smoke hovered above the party, covering the wasted youth of Creek View with a thick, pungent haze. It was like the whole town was swimming in failure, but no one realized they were drowning.”

But when Josh and Skylar start hanging out together more at the motel, they change their perception that “this was not the California of people’s dreams.” It wasn’t easy though. Josh has severe PTSD and depression. At one point he thinks:

“Before we shipped out, I thought it was so cool that I was going to war. Felt like a bad motherfucker. Then I saw our first guy go down and it wasn’t so cool anymore. I’d wish them back, man, I say. You nod as you pack some more chew. I’d wish all of them back. Now I look at the pills lined up on my desk and my empty room and my metal leg. The moon’s not big enough to wish on. Nothing is.”

In his therapy group, he muses:

“We sit in a circle, young old men. Look into our eyes and you can see the war, how even though we’re home we never left.”

For Skylar, it’s frustrating:

“Hanging out with Josh was like learning how to drive stick. It was hard enough just to start and then it was one stall after another. But somehow I always managed to crawl forward, just a little bit.”

But as they grow closer, it’s more and more important for her to keep trying:

“I ran my fingers along the raised letters on the dog tags that spelled out all the pertinent information the military needed about Josh. But the important stuff - how he watched out for me, how good he was at chess, the way he always hit his knee when he laughed - they weren’t the sort of things you could stamp onto a thin piece of metal.”

Her art gives her perspective as well:

“If you could make a beautiful piece of art from discarded newspapers and old matchbooks, then it meant that everything had potential. And maybe people were like collages - no matter how broken or useless we felt, we were an essential part of the whole. We mattered.”

Eventually, Josh decides he needs to figure out why he has to live, and how it might be possible to move on, which is where the title (and the Rumi poem with which the author begins the book) come into play. And Sky discovers that Creek View can feel like home, after all.

Discussion: This book is excellent. The author did a great deal of research on veterans and on PTSD and integrated it flawlessly into a very good story. She cites a number of sources in her Afterword (most germane to this story, perhaps is the book Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel in which he writes: “The truth of war is that it’s always about loving the guy next to you, the truth of the after-war is that you’re on your own.”)

She also addresses the high rate of suicide among veterans. As the Active Heroes website records:

Veterans are committing suicide in these high numbers attributed to triggering points:
• Depression
• Survivor’s guilt
• Self-blame for mission failure
• Impaired thinking caused by alcohol or substance abuse
• An Altered worldview due to post-traumatic stress
• Traumatic brain injury."

Evaluation: This is one book that deserves a wide audience. It is a touching love story, with important social and political messages. Highly recommended! show less

Disclaimer: I am a huge Heather Demetrios fan. Seriously, Something Real and Exquisite Captive were both 5-star books for me so there was no doubt in my mind that I would love I’ll Meet You There as well.

I’ll Meet You There tells us the story of Skylar and Josh. Skylar is counting down the days until she gets to finally leave her family trailer and attend art school. Josh had gotten out of Creek View but was forced back after he lost his leg in Afghanistan. He’s battling his PTSD while trying to get his life back on track. Their lives become more and more intertwined and Josh becomes a threat to Skylar’s leave-and-never-look-back plan.

While the relationship of Skylar and Josh are front and center it really is so much more than show more that. I’ve grown up in small towns/cities where almost everybody I know was so content on staying where they were working fairly dead end jobs while I was desperate to get out and Demetrios captures that feeling so well. It also shows the other side of that, the people who are content with small town life and how they might feel when people around them act like living a small town life is the worst thing in the world. It definitely made me think about how I’ve talked about my dreams to get out to those who stayed. It also deals with lasting issues soldiers face when they come back from war. The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson is another favourite of mine that deals with this issue and while they are completely different books they both examples of PSTD being portrayed extremely real and well done. I’ll Meet You There is just one of those books that pull you in and you never even want it to let you go. show less

Aptly described as the armpit of California, Creek View doesn't boast much to offer for kids growing up off Highway 99. Skylar and her friend Chris made a pact as kids, and now, after graduation, only need to make it through one last summer before each heads to their dream schools. Skylar's mom may derail her plans as she starts to implode after the loss of her Taco Bell job and questionable choice of a new boyfriend. Skylar finds peace at her job at the Paradise Motel, where she has time to work on her art and the owner Marge offers more support than her own mother. Enter former high school golden boy Josh, recently returned from Afghanistan to recuperate from injuries he received while a Marine. He returns to his job at the Paradise show more and what could fall into a treacly YA romance with snappy dialogue ("I swear, the Mitchell boys were raised on Playboy while the rest of us normal kids were reading Dr. Seuss.") veers into a courageous and realistic look at how these kids choose to survive their surroundings.

"The other towns needed us: you can't have the light without the dark, right? Maybe our darkness was necessary for other people to see their light." show less

I was totally exhausted by the first third of this book, stressed for the second third, weepy for the ... third third? lord, FYA book club, why must you tax me like this. this was actually a reasonably good, nuanced contemporary YA book! (well, mostly nuanced.) everyone was fucked up and dealing in ways I understood and respected! (tho the collage thing was a bit much.) I'm just finally at the point in my life where it's like, teen!keri would've loved the fuck out of this book and appreciated its existence, whilst adult!keri is like, THANK THE GOOD LORD I AM AN ADULT WHO FINALLY GOT OUT OF THERE, PLEASE GIVE ME A BEER. all the beers, thx, and all the cigarettes too, woooooooooooooo boy.

This book. This book is. . .everything.

It is happiness and sorrow. It's holding on for dear life and learning to let go. It's big dreams and hard truths. It's friendship and love and mistakes and "I've got you."

It's beautiful and heartbreaking and real and important. It is TRUTH.

"Love is medicine and dreams are oxygen."

If you have any connection to the military, read this book. If you don't have any connection to the military, READ THIS BOOK.

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I really wasn’t sure what to expect from I’ll Meet You There. Demetrios debuted so strongly with Something Real, a family-oriented novel about reality TV and first love. Then her second novel was a fantasy, which I didn’t get to, but it was obviously a departure in more than just genre. With I’ll Meet You There, though a contemporary again like her debut, Demetrios once again does something quite different. I’ll Meet You There is edgier, rougher, and messed with my emotions like whoa.

One of those discussions that comes up a lot when authors talk about review peeves is “likable” and “relatable” characters. Every book doesn’t require the show more characters to be likable or someone the reader can relate to, but it often helps. I’ll Meet You There is one of those cases where I find neither Skylaer nor Josh relatable, as in similar to me and my life, and I find Josh quite unlikable. Except that I totally ended up relating and liking and shipping them.

The thing is that, though on paper Josh is someone I would loathe, and, if I met him in person, I would no doubt dislike him strongly, his character is so well drawn. Creek View is a town completely unlike where I grew up; it’s very much not middle class suburbia, aka what I am used to. However, Demetrios has such an amazing way with narrative voice that I was completely sucked in and found myself truly empathizing with characters I ordinarily might not. I love when authors get me to care about people, like Josh, who I might expect to hate. I’m just so impressed.

Josh was basically lead douchecanoe in high school. He did the whole stupid prank thing, got drunk a lot, and used a whole lot of offensive language. Then he joined the Marines and went to Afghanistan. At the beginning of I’ll Meet You There, Josh is back and down to one leg. At first, he seems to be very much the same guy that he was then, considering the way he jokingly greets someone with “faggot.” I really was not expecting to be a fan of the ship at that point, but Skylar totally calls him out for that later, and you learn so much more about Josh as the book goes on.

As you might expect, this is one of those ships that took time. I was worried initially about the fact that Skylar had had a week-long relationship with Josh’s brother after he left, because that sounded like melodrama central, but it really wasn’t an issue. What really made me ship this, and holy shit did I ever, was the fact that they connect on such a deep level and open up about so much. Skylar especially is really good for Josh, because she’s completely non-judgmental about his various post-war issues, unlike everyone else in the world. They’re both going through hard shit and really need someone to listen, and sometimes you just don’t feel like you can talk to the people who have always been there, you know? It’s not just that, though. They’re not just serious and sincere all the time; they joke and banter and fight and make up and YES to it all. Despite my concerns about Josh and his mistakes, I was still desperate to push these two together.

It might seem like Josh is all messed up and Skylar’s life is sunny, but that’s very much not the case. Her mother has been depressed for years since Skylar’s father died in a car accident. After her mom loses her job, she descends into the depths of despair. Suddenly Skylar, who’s meant to be leaving at the end of the summer for her full scholarship to college, is having to work two jobs to try to pay all the bills on their trailer. Skylar has almost been the parent, and she has to choose between her future and protecting her mother.

I’m also a big fan of the friendships in I’ll Meet You There. Marge, Josh and Skylar’s boss, ends up being an amazing character, though I was not expecting to really see her at all. She’s a better mother to them than their own mothers, and this definitely gave me unexpected feels. I also adore Skylar’s friend, Dylan, a teen mom. Unlike Skylar and Chris (the other part of their triumvirate), Dylan won’t be getting out of Creek View; I love that this comes up and her speech about being happy with her life. Chris I didn’t like as much as a character, since I felt like he never ended up serving much of a specific role; his unrequited endless crush on Dylan really got old too.

The only other thing that I don’t love about I’ll Meet You There is Josh’s POV. He has these one to two page chapters every so often. They’re written in a stream of consciousness way that was really hard for me to read. I praise the fact that his voice was very distinct from Skylar’s in more than just the formatting, but I also did not like reading them. More than that, I really didn’t get anything from them that rounded out my understanding of the overall plot. They didn’t add to my reading experience at all.

I’ll Meet You There was an awesome book to end 2014 on and start 2015. Heather Demetrios has incredibly talent at first person narration, and I’m excited for her next projects. If you’ve read I’ll Meet You There and liked it, I highly urge you check out Something Like Normal by Trish Doller, which is similar in a lot of ways but from the perspective of the guy coming home. show less