I'll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios

Guys, I just spent my 4th of July falling in love with a new book boyfriend!!! Josh Mitchell from I'll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios. Gah, this was such a great book. I have a book hangover on the 4th of July and it is all Skylar and Josh's fault....spoiler alert....I wouldn't have it any other way.

photo credit: atheist dog tags via photopin (license)

We meet Skylar when she has just graduated from high school and is about to leave her hometown of Creek View, California in her dust. She has a huge scholarship to study art in San Fransico. If only she can make it through this summer. The book starts with Skylar attending a party with the hope of seeing Josh Mitchell, her former co-worker at the Paradise Motel.

Josh, Josh, Josh. He is the stuff of local legends. He attained a godlike swagger prior to leaving Creek View in the dust for the Marines. Josh is back in town as a result of a tragic incident in Afghanistan. After attempts at healing, Josh is on leave and is back in town to continue the process of healing (or at least trying to attain a new normal).

Josh starts working at the Paradise again and Skylar starts feeling some kind of way about him (okay, she has a full-blown crush on him). Skylar is a very relatable character who has an incredibly tough life. She is trying to navigate the summer before college and has to do so in a very adult manner. Her mother is a ne'er do well who cannot help Skylar properly adult. She was devastated by the death of Skylar's father (when Sky was 12)--this event has emotionally stunted her and she was never properly able to recover, process, and ultimately move on with her life. Mother has been stuck working at Taco Bell for the past eighteen years, living in the run down trailer park, and is now relying upon the company of a fellow ne'er do well, Billy Easton, the former best friend of Sky's dad. That's messed up? Right? Skylar sure thinks so, enough so that she leaves home and spends the bulk of her time elsewhere.

photo credit: Eastern Hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis) via photopin (license)

Skylar starts spending a lot of time with Josh and both of them have very conflicting feelings about this time together. Skylar has made a pact with her best male friend Chris to get out of town and leave Creek View with no entanglements. Josh, and the desire to care for her mother, start pulling her back to Creek View. Skylar has to wrestle with these entanglements and comes to a fragile truce having made peace with her mother, Creek View, and Josh by the end of this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful book.

I cannot express my love of this book adequately. Read it, you won't regret it at all.

What I Loved:

Josh Mitchell--he's my new book boyfriend. It has to be a delicate balancing act to create a character facing as many demons as Josh. Demetrios hit a grand slam when she created Josh and Sky. They are very relatable and honest characters.

Skylar was a strong female character who had to wrestle with some very BIG and important decisions. She did so in a very grown up manner for someone of her age and circumstances.

Supporting characters were all wonderfully written. Even the scuzzy supporting characters you might not have ever wanted to root for, you ended up caring what happened to them (as long as they would leave Sky and Josh alone).

Meaningful Quotes:

"Central California was a veritable no-man's-land: this was not the California of people's dreams. We didn't have a music-video world of palm trees and sandy beaches that we frolicked on under the sun. I mean, there were more items on the McDonald's Value Menu than there were things to do in Creek View" (Demetrios, 2015 p. 41).

"Hanging out with Josh was like learning how to drive stick. It was hard enough just to start and then it was one stall after another. But somehow I always managed to crawl forward just a little bit" (Demetrios, 2015 p. 92).

"A crush. I had a silly crush because he'd suddenly became exotic, an enigmatic hero. He'd been in a land full of mysteriously clothed women and men in long tunics and turbans. He'd seen the kind of stuff Picasso painted Guernica for. He had stories to tell, unlike anyone else in this town.

But I'd had crushes before, and this...this was no crush" (Demetrios, 2015 p. 101).

"In my essay for San Fran, I'd written about how I'd always felt like there was something magical about taking bits and pieces of the world around me and creating something whole. It gave me hope: if you could make a beautiful piece of art from discarded newspapers and old matchbooks, then it meant that everything had potential. And maybe people were like collages--no matter how broken or useless we felt, we were an essential part of the whole. We mattered" (Demetrios, 2015 p. 108).

"I went back to tearing up a magazine for Marge's collage, the feel of paper familiar, soothing. Picasso was right when he said, "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." Just as the rain outside drenched Creek View, my art was washing me clean" (Demetrios, 2015 p. 163).

"This choreographer named Twyla Tharp once said, "Art is the only way to run away without leaving home." So I ran. As far and as fast as I could" (Demetrios, 2015 p. 296).

"The composer Stephen Sondheim said, "Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos." As I ran my hand over the finished collage, I decided that he was right. The mess of my life, of Creek View, of the summer, had been transformed into something beautiful" (Demetrios, 2015 p. 365).

"Love is medicine and dreams are oxygen" (Demetrios, 2015 p. 384).