Author: Juliana Stone
Release Date: May 5, 2015
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire (Sourcebooks imprint)
For Trevor normal was fast guitar licks, catching game-winning passes and partying all night. Until a car accident leaves Trevor with no band, no teammates and no chance of graduating. It's kinda hard to ace your finals when you've been in a coma. The last thing he needs is stuck-up Everly Jenkins as his new tutor—those beautiful blue eyes catching every last flaw. For Everly normal was a perfect family around the dinner table, playing piano at Sunday service and sunning by the pool. Until she discovers her whole life is a lie. Now the perfect pastor's daughter is hiding a life-changing secret, one that is slowly tearing her family apart. And spending the summer with notorious flirt Trevor Lewis means her darkest secret could be exposed.
Some Kind of Normal is a look at two teens trying to figure out how to get their lives back on track, back to normal, because they don't feel like what they have now is anywhere close. But what is normal?
Trevor is trying to get back to where he was before the accident. Before the traumatic brain injury, the coma, and the seizures. Everly is wishing her family was back the way it used to be. Before she discovered a secret of her father's, before she realized he wasn't who she thought he was. Both wish they could go back to before but they can't, and they're struggling to keep from falling under the waves of sadness and frustration. There's hope in their voices but it's drowned out by sorrow and anger. And they're just hoping it will all fix itself, they're keeping everything else inside and not relying on anyone for help. Not talking about it. Pretending it didn't happen and things can be normal again. But that never works.
What is normal? Normal is a lie, there is no normal. It's just seeing how put together everyone else looks and wanting to be like that. It's not wanting to stand out, to be stared at and pointed at, to be talked about behind out backs. It's wanting to blend in. We spend out lives searching for something that doesn't exist. Being "normal" is impossible so stop searching for it. Instead, just be you. Be happy, be healthy. Be around those you care about who also care about you. And talk about what's worrying you.
I found that Trevor's post-coma struggles were rather realistic, similar to Trina St. Jean's Blank. He wouldn't just bounce back once he woke up. There would've been a good amount of rehab, of setbacks, of new conditions and hurdles to climb over. It wasn't simple. I do think this book highlights the stress that some teens put themselves through by keeping all their concerns and problems locked away, the struggle that teens go through to put up a façade so they look "normal." It isn't healthy, it rarely works out, because it all gets exposed sooner or later. I would definitely recommend this to fans of the author's previous YA novel as well as fans of contemporary romance.
(I received an e-galley of this title to review from Sourcebooks through NetGalley.)
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