A Million Miles Away

Sweet book. Really enjoyed

Another title this weekend from a YA perspective and a heavy dose of grief. Sure, there are more issues here: honesty, motivations and even the search to redefine oneself after a major world-shift, but those are the essentials. Laura Avery has a lovely poetic writing style: her characters are developed with care and reveal little pieces of themselves gradually, allowing insight into motivations and choices in a way that wouldn’t have worked otherwise. But a very tenuous grip on plausibility / believability just missed the mark for me.

Kelsey and Michelle had seen Peter off to his deployment in Afghanistan the morning before Michelle’s death. With the death of Michelle, the existence of Peter as Michelle’s boyfriend is not even on Kelsey’s radar. She’s too busy dealing with her own grief and what ifs.

A skype connection from Peter, who instantly mistakes Kelsey for Michelle, and shares that her memory is all that keeps him alive and we are off and running. While Kelsey’s motivations are understandable to some extent, her willingness to allow Peter to confuse her with her now dead sister just threw up all sorts of warning bells for me. Described as polar opposites, and from Kelsey’s searching and memories about her sister, it’s not as if she was completely at home with all things Michelle, Peter never notices a difference. That just confused me – how can she have JUST met him, know nothing about him, and then suddenly become her sister so completely that Peter (no matter his stress) can’t see it? It just didn’t work.

The façade continues, Kelsey as Michelle, until Kelsey starts to find she has feelings for Peter. Again – I can’t help but think that it was convenient and contrived – where the blurring of her own thoughts and feelings become her sister’s. The steps that Kelsey took to ‘discover’ more were intriguing, and the memories shared showed the sublimation of Kelsey’s own desires and likes in the quest to deal with her grief.

Now, even with the overlay of fairy tale to this story, I was intrigued. While the progression of the story is predictable after that first initial deception, the relationship progresses as expected, with Kelsey’s entanglement in the lie, in Peter and in her own single-minded determination to know her dead sister becomes all consuming, but never boring.

A story that is a mildly angsty read that will entertain but expects a great suspension of disbelief from readers, this read will entertain and amuse while in the pages. Avery’s voices and characters are well crafted, reasons behind choices are accessible if not comfortable or acceptable. When does a lie in support of a reason thought logical and right at the time of the first telling become just a lie?

I received an eArc copy of the title from the publisher via NetGalley for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.