Everything That Makes You by Moriah McStayPublished by HarperCollins on March 17, 2015
Genres: Contemporary, Love & Romance, Young Adult
Pages: 352
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One girl. Two stories. Meet Fiona Doyle. The thick ridges of scar tissue on her face are from an accident twelve years ago. Fiona has notebooks full of songs she’s written about her frustrations, her dreams, and about her massive crush on beautiful uber-jock Trent McKinnon. If she can’t even find the courage to look Trent straight in his beautiful blue eyes, she sure isn’t brave enough to play or sing any of her songs in public. But something’s changing in Fiona. She can’t be defined by her scars anymore.
And what if there hadn’t been an accident? Meet Fi Doyle. Fi is the top-rated female high school lacrosse player in the state, heading straight to Northwestern on a full ride. She’s got more important things to deal with than her best friend Trent McKinnon, who’s been different ever since the kiss. When her luck goes south, even lacrosse can’t define her anymore. When you’ve always been the best at something, one dumb move can screw everything up. Can Fi fight back?
Everything That I Wanted
I almost didn’t pick up this one. Honestly. I loved Just Like Fate which has a similar concept, but something about this just didn’t feel like a me book. Maybe it was the fact that the book seemed to half-focus on the romance between a girl and her crush. Which, frankly, isn’t really me. I’m more of a tragic/unexpected/forbidden love kinda girl. But Harper sent me an ARC and I’d seen it around, so I shrugged and picked it up.
And almost immediately fell in love.
There are a lot of things I didn’t expect from this book–the heartbreak, the outcomes, and just all of it. There are so many mentions of what-should’ve-beens, what-ifs, and maybes thrown around in this book that it’s absolutely devastating in the long run. This isn’t a sci-fi where the two parallel worlds intercross–it’s a story about how one thing can change everything. (And in that way, it’s a bit different than Just Like Fate View Spoiler » )
There was a certain whimsical feeling about this book, especially when it came to parallel characters and parallel situations–and something tragic about it. In one story, Fiona would realize her dream. In another, she’d throw it away. In one she fell in love from the beginning and had to find out who she was after. In another, she had to discover who she was before falling in love. There are so many contradicting and similar things, it’d take me forever to list them all out.
One of the most intriguing things, by far, was seeing how much a character, even a minor one, would change because of Fiona/Fi’s incident. They would be half strangers and best friends. Jerks and the sweetest people you could know. It was incredible, seeing all of these juxtaposing characters and seeing how they interacted with each other and then how they interacted with each other in the other story. Now that I think about it though, it seems that minor characters in one story became major characters in the other and vice versa. (The longer I write this review, the more I discover about this book–McStay’s kind of a genius.)
Marcus and Trent and Jackson though. I mean, I’m not saying which story is which, but these boys were pretty swoony. I’ll take…all of them. The synopsis does make it sound like the majority of this book focuses on the romance (specifically the romance with Trent McKinnon), I can’t help but feel like that’s far fromt rue. Yes, there’s romance, and yes, there’s a lot of it, but it was never really the romance that made me fall in love with this book (as fabulous as it was). It was just the way it was written and the little bits of genius sprinkled througout.
It’s hard to write about this book, actually. I can’t really say anything more because of spoilers and if I wrote a review on each separate timeline…we could be here a while. Fi and Fiona’s characters were so different and so similar in different ways–they just seemed to discover themselves at different moments, little pieces of themselves every other chapter.
In case you haven’t realized, this means YES, YOU SHOULD READ IT. I’ll recommend this to anyone and everyone. I’ll admit, it does, at times, get confusing because of the whole Fi/Fiona thing, but reading about these two different story lines that stem from the same incident can’t help but make you wonder about all those what-should’ve-beens, what-ifs, and maybes if you hadn’t before.
