Meet Savannah Darcy Rose, also known as Sparrow. She’s a highschooler from Virginia, USA, and she’s also a ballerina. She has a couple of close friends called Lucas and Delaney, and a perfect boyfriend called Tristan, but she also has a dead mother and a dark secret.
The prologue for this book hooked me instantly. There’s danger and mystery, and I couldn’t stop reading because the answers aren’t given straight away. After the prologue, we’re thrown straight into Sparrow’s hectic life. This book has a typical American YA feel to it, full of teen drama and angst. The teenagers feel like teenagers, except that for some reason they can all quote Shakespeare? I don’t know, maybe American teenagers are more literary than British teenagers!
There’s a lot I loved about this book. The imagery is beautiful. It started in the prologue, and the book is consistantly beautiful the entire way through. It’s also Aesthetic™. Some of the descriptions are just wonderful. I particularly loved the perfect latte that Sparrow had in one of the chapters. There’s also something about ballet that’s just really alluring. Perhaps the beauty of it, perhaps the discipline behind it. I’m fascinated by it, and I know I’m not alone in that feeling. I really liked the little details about ballet that Jackson included in the book. I also appreciated the inclusion of Lucas as a male main character who is also a ballerina, because boys do ballet too. Overall, Lucas was actually my favourite character. The book switches between Sparrow and Lucas as narrators, and I felt Lucas’s perspective really made the book for me. I found the story easier to get into when he was narrating. I really loved the friendship and chemistry between Sparrow and Lucas. Speaking of characters I loved, Sophie and Granny Deirdre were also high on the list.
This book is pretty fast paced. In some ways this is good; I didn’t get bored by it. But sometimes the speed made things feel unrealistic or underdeveloped. The relationship with Tristan was one of these things. We keep getting told by Sparrow that Tristan is wonderful and perfect, except when he’s angry, but we rarely see that. He feels over the top, almost too perfectly evil as a villain, and for a lot of the book, because I couldn’t see the side of him that Sparrow supposedly saw, I felt like I wanted to shake some sense into Sparrow. The relationship just didn’t feel particularly real or dynamic. The fast pace of the book also didn’t really give justice to the relationships between Sparrow and the other characters. I really would have loved to see more about Delaney.
I have one other issue, and it’s with the clothing descriptions. Perhaps it’s because I’m not the target audience, and maybe these descriptions would interest teenage girls, but I was just overwhelmed by the in depth descriptions of what the characters were wearing. I don’t care about their clothing, unless it’s something that really shows off their personality or is related to the plot, and I found myself skipping over these parts.
This is the sort of book I would have absolutely loved as a teen. Drama, angst and dangerous romance. There’s the hint of a love triangle (and would a book even be YA if it didn’t have this?), and a mystery to slowly piece together, and an exploration into mental health and abuse. By the second half of the book, the characters felt a lot more real, and it was a rollercoaster of emotions. This book is an easy read, with difficult subject matter, a good read for an older teen.
I received this book from Netgalley for free in return for an honest review.
Harri Reads 