Author: Sharon Bradley

           Reading level: Young Adult

           Paperback: 110 pages

           Publisher: iUniverse, Inc. (October 31, 2004)

                      ISBN: 0595326722

The following review was contributed by: Jennifer Murray Jennifer Murray. Click  HERE   to view more of Jennifer's Reviews

Sharon Bradley’s first book deals with the life transition and the emotional roller coaster that goes along with it between two best friends, Katie Mitchell and Alan Thomas. We join them with around six month’s left of their senior year and follow them to almost to the end of college. The main question that Bradley poses is how do you know if making that tentative leap from best friends to something more won’t do long term damage to the relationship that you have in the here and now?

Bradley does a wonderful job having the reader feel as if they are on that same emotional roller coaster of doubts and questions she has put her main characters on. Katie starts questioning each and every reaction as to what is real, what is just caught up in the moment, and what the bottom line best choice at that point in time is for her. Yet within all of that, I, as the reader, had a hard time keeping track of the passage of time between events. I would be half way into the story before I would realize that I was reading about another story that occurred at a later time and I was just blending the two into one.

 A natural side effect of being a character driven story to where the environment, for the most part, is just incidental. Bradley did add other characters to the story to play with the dynamic between Katie and Alan but I just found myself wishing that just a little more depth was given to them. To me, they were almost as important as the two main characters since in the end they help them make decisions that help propel them along to achieve their goals.

Overall I did enjoy the story and feel it does a great job showing that your not alone with a head full of swirling questions wondering if it’s worth risking making a very close friend of the opposite sex something more. As Bradley told us in her story, there’s always going to be something that will change the dynamic to a relationship, be it another person, a brush with tragedy or just something as natural as a divergence of paths. In the end, the only thing that you can count on not being a “mistake” is to be true to yourself and your dreams. I think Sharon Bradley says that beautifully in this story.