Publisher Description
Love—good and bad—forces three teens’ worlds to tilt in a riveting novel from New York Times bestselling author Ellen Hopkins.
Three teens, three stories—all interconnected through their parents’ family relationships. As the adults pull away, caught up in their own dilemmas, the lives of the teens begin to tilt...
Mikayla, almost eighteen, is over-the-top in love with Dylan, who loves her back. But what happens to that love when Mikayla gets pregnant the summer before their senior year—and decides to keep the baby?
Shane turns sixteen that same summer and falls hard in love with his first boyfriend, Alex, who happens to be HIV positive. Shane has lived for four years with his little sister’s impending death. Can he accept Alex’s love, knowing that his life, too, will be shortened?
Harley is fourteen—a good girl searching for new experiences, especially love from an older boy. She never expects to hurdle toward self-destructive extremes in order to define who she is and who she wants to be.
Love, in all its forms, has crucial consequences in this standalone novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this companion to Hopkins's adult book, Triangles (2011), the author offers a gripping novel-in-verse about teens whose lives shift dramatically because of sex. High school junior Mikayla is in love, but her relationship with her boyfriend is tested when she gets pregnant. Shane, 16, is dating a boy with HIV and coping with his four-year-old sister's incurable illness. Harley, a freshman, starts experimenting with drinking and drugs, as an older boy pressures her to have sex. Readers unfamiliar with Triangles may have trouble tracking the characters' interlinked relationships, but Hopkins's many fans will find plenty of authenticity, especially in Harley's story ("I'm Running/ With a fast crowd and I'm not/ sure how I got here... I never expected to go/ this far"), and appreciate the author's clever touches (the closing words/lines of the three narrators' sections lead into single-page poems from the POV of other key characters). While these stories are not quite as compelling as those in Hopkins's previous books, readers will likely move through this installment just as quickly. Ages 14 up.
