When 14 year old Anna meets Will Bennett, she feels overwhelmed with luck. Hot, cool Will choosing a nobody like her. However Anna finds that being with Will is not easy. He expects a lot from her, and she is desperate to keep him. She becomes slowly isolated from her friends, family and counsellor and feels less and less confident in herself. Will mixes his criticism with compliments, and she finds herself changing to please him, to keep him thinking that she's beautiful.
"He could be really nice you know. He made me feel special"Thats the part that made me feel the most pain, that she relied on him to make her feel good. I think a lot of people can relate to that. He was very manipulative, threatening her with self harm, putting her down and making her feel bad about spending time with others.
I liked Anna as a character, she was relatively easy to relate to and feel sympathy for. A lot of the time I just wanted to hug her. I loved that she used music as an escape. However it took a while for me to warm up to her.
Will was more difficult to like, but of course that's the point. I liked the challenge of trying to work out what had happened to him and who he was writing to in his POV pages. I'm glad we had the pages from him so that we could understand him more, but I think if there had been more from him, it would have taken away from Anna's story too much.
This book made me feel sick and shaky. It was gripping and accurate. If you are interested in dark, realistic YA then this is the book for you. I think this should be a must read for every teenager to warn them of the dangers of an abusive relationship, and to help them spot the signs.
It was a quick read, I read it in a couple of hours in one sitting. I think it would have been less intense if I'd have read it in multiple sittings, but I just couldn't put it down.
I'm rating this 4 stars. It would have been five except for the fact that it took me a long time to warm up to Anna. Otherwise it was an excellent book.
