Author: Ashley Schumacher

Publisher: Wednesday Books

ISBN: 9781250779786

Now, as a junior, she may have taken on a challenge too big even for her ambitions. The band director has assigned a big duet to her and has his eye on her progress. The director is fair but also doesn’t give his musicians a lot of room for error. Either Anna learns the duet ASAP, or it’ll go to someone else.

It doesn’t help that the duet is with Weston Ryan, a senior and the school’s “bad boy.” He wears a leather jacket everywhere he goes—even in the punishing Texas summers—and he spent his junior year at the high school in the neighboring town. No one knows for sure why, but there’s gossip that Weston vandalized school property and had to get away.

None of that matters now. Anna needs to learn the duet, and Weston is the only one who can help her. She asks him to do just that, and the two begin an uneasy alliance colored at first by other people’s opinions. Anna knows what people think of Weston, and she’s convinced she knows what Weston sees in her: a girl who’s curvy in all the wrong ways and who will screw up the duet because she keeps messing up in rehearsal.

Wes doesn’t care about other people. With his parents’ divorce and them trying to figure everything out, his life has fallen apart. He doesn’t have time to listen to gossip and worry about what people think of his cursing. 

When he meets Anna, though, he does start to care. Not about the people; about Anna. About her opinion of him, about not using so many four-letter words, even about his grades. Anything to make her smile and keep her attention on him a little longer.

As the new friends work through the duet and navigate the school year and small-town life together, their relationship morphs into love with ease. The band competition that determines the group’s reputation is looming, and parents, teachers, and even their friends circle side-eye them, but Anna and Weston don’t care. They know that every moment is better with one another.

Author Ashley Schumacher completely captures the headiness of teen love and its sense of magnification. Her descriptions and metaphors fit Anna and Weston’s time of life perfectly. The target audience for the book, no doubt, will find it speaks to them as a friend would.

The book comes with its flaws, however, some of them glaring. The biggest one is the lack of a plot that works toward a defined climax. If Schumacher’s intention was to relay a tale of young love, its special moments, and the bittersweet ending of it all, she has done that with masterful writing. However, the narrative keeps leading readers to believe that everything is working toward something big. When that big event occurs, savvy readers will spot it several chapters beforehand. Given the direction the book heads, there’s nothing else that could happen other than the challenge that comes Anna and Weston’s way. It’s cliché and somewhat of a letdown.

Other story elements like Weston’s parents’ divorce, the “small-mindedness” of a small town, even Anna’s parents’ protectiveness get relegated to the background. For Anna and Weston, nothing matters other than their relationship. Unfortunately the narrative also lets the implied importance of those other issues fade.

The book promises so much but doesn’t deliver on its promises. Readers who want nothing more than romance will probably want to check this out. Anyone who expects major conflicts or surprises may want to stay away. That’s why I think Full Flight Borders on Bypass it.