Such A Rush By Jennifer Echols Review

Source: Purchased
Genre: YA-Contemporary
Publisher: MTV Books
Date Published: December 18, 2012
Number of Pages: 336

A sexy and poignant romantic tale of a young daredevil pilot caught between two brothers.

When I was fourteen, I made a decision. If I was doomed to live in a trailer park next to an airport, I could complain about the smell of the jet fuel like my mom, I could drink myself to death over the noise like everybody else, or I could learn to fly.

Heaven Beach, South Carolina, is anything but, if you live at the low-rent end of town. All her life, Leah Jones has been the grown-up in her family, while her mother moves from boyfriend to boyfriend, letting any available money slip out of her hands. At school, they may diss Leah as trash, but she’s the one who negotiates with the landlord when the rent’s not paid. At fourteen, she’s the one who gets a job at the nearby airstrip.

But there’s one way Leah can escape reality. Saving every penny she can, she begs quiet Mr. Hall, who runs an aerial banner-advertising business at the airstrip and also offers flight lessons, to take her up just once. Leaving the trailer park far beneath her and swooping out over the sea is a rush greater than anything she’s ever experienced, and when Mr. Hall offers to give her cut-rate flight lessons, she feels ready to touch the sky.

By the time she’s a high school senior, Leah has become a good enough pilot that Mr. Hall offers her a job flying a banner plane. It seems like a dream come true... but turns out to be just as fleeting as any dream. Mr. Hall dies suddenly, leaving everything he owned in the hands of his teenage sons: golden boy Alec and adrenaline junkie Grayson. And they’re determined to keep the banner planes flying.

Though Leah has crushed on Grayson for years, she’s leery of getting involved in what now seems like a doomed business—until Grayson betrays her by digging up her most damning secret. Holding it over her head, he forces her to fly for secret reasons of his own, reasons involving Alec. Now Leah finds herself drawn into a battle between brothers—and the consequences could be deadly. (from Goodreads)

Slow to start, Such A Rush picks up and stays pretty interesting for the most part. The tension between Leah and Grayson, the son of the owner of the airfield and company she works for, and the son of the man who taught her how to fly, is slow to build, but was definitely a fun roller coaster.

I enjoyed that you didn't know what Grayson's motivations were for blackmailing Leah into dating his twin brother Alec for the week. That was a twist, which I saw it coming, I enjoyed seeing how it played out without it being outright said right off the bat.

The ending was...interesting. I feel like that's all I've been saying in this review, but it's so hard to describe. It ended weird. The whole book was...different. You weren't sure what genre this should even be. It's definitely YA, but it doesn't feel very romancey (though that was in there at points) and it didn't necessarily feel contemporary either. I just don't know how to feel about it.

It was enjoyable. It was a good story with good characters. I can't believe it took place over, like, 5 days, but that's just how quickly the story moved along. It was just hard to get through the first 2 chapters. Boring. But it paid off at the end.