Main Character: Multiple POV’s.
Love Interest:
Series: None
Author: Website|Facebook|Twitter|Goodreads
Everybody knows, nobody’s talking. . . .
Seventeen-year-old Skylar Thompson is being questioned by the police. Her boyfriend, Jimmy, stands accused of brutally assaulting two young El Salvadoran immigrants from a neighboring town, and she’s the prime witness. Skylar is keeping quiet about what she’s seen, but how long can she keep it up?
But Jimmy was her savior. . . .
When her mother died, he was the only person who made her feel safe, protected from the world. But when she begins to appreciate the enormity of what has happened, especially when Carlos Cortez, one of the victims, steps up to demand justice, she starts to have second thoughts about protecting Jimmy. Jimmy’s accomplice, Sean, is facing his own moral quandary. He’s out on bail and has been offered a plea in exchange for testifying against Jimmy.
The truth must be told. . . .
Sean must decide whether or not to turn on his friend in order to save himself. But most important, both he and Skylar need to figure out why they would follow someone like Jimmy in the first place.
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I requested this book for review but whatever I was expecting, I got more. This book follows a group of people in a Long Island town who are affected beaner hopping. We have the kids who are involved in the violence, their girlfriends, the principal at their school, the injured boys and even the mother of the injured kids. I was blown away while I was reading this book. I mean, I can believe that this kind of stuff actually happen in real life but the reasons that go through the heads of the kids committing these violent acts totally just blow my mind.
This book isn’t one of those fluffy beach reads that I usually read. It’s more intense and it’s more, everything really. There’s emotion, there’s lies, there’s hate and even love in this story and it’s all wrapped up in the thoughts of everyone involved. My eyes couldn’t read fast enough to suit me, I had to know what everyone was thinking and what was going to happen. We’ve got white kids driving around “beaner hopping” and I had to know what the heck that was because I’ve never heard of it before.
Well, now I know and it made me sick. I couldn’t fathom going through something like being a family member of Arturo and Carlos Cortez. Reading their thoughts, knowing what happened, it broke my heart. People have their opinions on just about everything and that’s fine. It’s great even but to resort to violence, it’s never the answer.
I’m not sure who I felt for most, Jimmy or the Cortez brothers. The Cortez brothers are good boys who got caught up in a bad situation but Jimmy, he was brought up to think the way that he does and to see the world the way that he does. He was raised to become a grade A asshole and the things he did to justify his stance on everything drove me right up the wall. His girlfriend Skylar, who I guess is the main character drove me right up the wall as well with all of her hero worshiping over a guy who was bad news and then there was Lisa Marie, what a piece of crap that girl was. There wasn’t a person in this book outside of the Cortez brothers and their Mother that I didn’t hate. I hated the whole lot of them, the way that they thought, the things that they did. All of it, I hated it all.
This book is captivating, you won’t be able to stop reading this book because you’ll want to know what happens but when I got to the end of this book, I was disappointed because there isn’t much of a wrap up with this story. It starts off with a bang and ends most abruptly and I was left feeling all out of sorts. I was hoping that we’d get at least one chapter from Jimmy’s perspective but we don’t and I really wish that we could. Not because I wanted to understand him any better or anything but because I wanted to see what he was thinking about through all of this. What was going through his head when he found out what happened to Arturo?
This book was intense and it was filled to the brim with emotion. Hate, love, it’s all in here and it’s not a book that I would recommend lightly. This isn’t a book for people who are into contemporary YA romances, it’s much too different from all of that but the one thing that I hope people take away from this story is understanding that one lie has the ability to affect so many people’s lives and not always in a good way. Your actions have consequences and when your actions hurt other people, you should pay for them because no matter what anyone has done, you don’t have the right to put your hands on them in a manner that could hurt them. I hope the teens that read this book realize that hurting others is not something to take lightly, it’s not something to laugh at and it’s not anything to mock, it’s bad news and if you’re hanging with a crowd that is into that kind of stuff, run far far away.
..and that’s your scoop!
Book cover and blurb credit: http://barnesandnoble.com
