Thank you to NetGalley and Smith Publicity for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Life on the road is all Corey Ryder has known. At seventeen years old she works at her aunt’s circus as a trainee trapeze artist. Being up in the air performing every night is what she loves to do and cannot imagine her life any other way. The circus is her home and its performers her family.
The circus stops at Sherwood, California and to Corey it seems like nothing can go wrong especially when she is given the opportunity to be the lead trapeze artist for the performance. However, a rogue fire leaves her life in tatters and Corey is forced to leave the circus and revisit a part of her life which she’s been trying to forget.
Corey is thrust back into her mother’s life and the two are exceptionally awkward around each other. Her mother is quick to enter Corey into high school and for Corey it’s a clear sign that this is her new home. There would be no more travelling, instead she would be cooped up in a house which her mother obsessively cleans and having to start fresh when all she really wants is to be back on the road with her true family.
Corey is convinced she’ll never fit in to Sherwood and cannot wait for the moment that she can finally break free and return to life on the road. However, an unlikely romance blossoms between Corey and Luke Everett, the most popular boy in school, which has Corey second guessing leaving Sherwood.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and read it within a few hours! I was completely hooked from the synopsis and the book did not disappoint. The characters were well written and the universe that Leigh Ansell has created is phenomenal.
I adored Corey and how strong she was through everything that happened in this book. She was thrown into a situation which was completely out of the norm for her but quickly adapted and found herself even wanting to achieve at school. Her relationship with Luke was adorable and I was rooting for them from their first meeting in Joe’s Diner.
This book did touch on physical abuse and I’m impressed with how well Leigh Ansell wrote those scenes. Sometimes when you read books about abuse, trauma, mental illness the writer sometimes has trouble trying to make it realistic, but Leigh did a fantastic job of making it feel so real even when the matter was so dark.
I do wish I could have seen more scenes of the circus life and more scenes of Corey and her mother trying to form a relationship after seventeen years. There wasn’t much dialogue between the two and I would have just liked to see the two sit down and have a proper conversation.
Overall I really enjoyed this book and have given it a 5/5 stars. It’s such a quick but unique story about a young girl who is thrown into a situation that is so out of her element and how she deals with it. I really do recommend reading this and I cannot wait to pick up the final copy!