Full Measures - Rebecca Yarros
9:39 PM
So the story is about Ember, a twenty-year-old girl who lives in Colorado. Her father was deported to Afghanistan months earlier, and around Christmas time, her family receives the news that her father was killed in war. Ember's mother is completely destroyed, her little brother is slightly too young to understand, and her seventeen-year-old sister uses shopping and sex to heal. Someone has to take care of the family, so Ember steps up and decides not to return to Boulder for school to stay home. It might not be the worst thing ever, though, since she runs into her high school crush. And he's just as perfect as he used to be.
Josh is three years older than Ember, but they were in high school at the same time for a while. He was a manwhore; the kind of guy every single girl wanted to sleep with. He was also the star of the hockey team, and even scored a full ride scholarship. But something happened, and now he goes to community college where Ember enrolls, and he also happens to be her new neighbor when she moves in with her best friend. What Ember doesn't know, though, is that Josh also had a crush on her back in high school, and this time, he doesn't plan on letting her go.
The plot has so much potential, don't get me wrong. However, the characters are supposed to be in their twenties, and when you read this book, it feels like you're reading a teen book with sixteen-year-old characters. They are so immature, it's almost sad. Josh is twenty-three, tall, tattooed, experienced, etc., etc., but he acts like a school girl around Ember, which, to be quite honest, is very unrealistic. And Ember – you see her taking care of her family, acting all grown up around her sister and little brother, and making mature decisions about school, but around Josh, you'd think she's fourteen and has never seen a man before.
Although I was turned off all through this book by the immature characters, the story itself was not bad. The plot twist at the end is pretty interesting because I hadn't seen it coming at all. There are never any dead moments in the book; something is always happening, so it makes the book go by quickly.
It was my first novel by Rebecca Yarros, but I enjoyed her writing. I like how she describes the characters' emotions, almost as if you are right with them. That seems to be something a lot of writers aren't able to do properly. As for the rest of the writing, it's a little bit more complex than other novels I've read recently, but it gives the book some maturity it lacks from the characters.
Overall, not a bad book, but definitely not the best. I won't be reading the whole series, but I don't regret spending three nights on this one.
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