First off that’s to the publisher and author for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review.
3.5 Stars
I started reading this book thinking it’d be some cheesy summer love story, and was surprised by what it ended up being. It’s a great read, that I highly recommend you to read during the summer. Especially if you also have a slight interest in sky diving as I do. I would definitely be interested in reading a sequel, exploring more of Cary’s aka Clancy’s new found relationship with her dad and with Denny.

1.5 Stars

I think I can best sum up my thoughts as: eh. This was mostly a forgettable book for me, with underwhelming characters and poor relationships on all levels. The only character I really liked was Denny, and I thought he was underdeveloped. But I actively disliked Clancy, the main characters, and ALL the relationships in the story - familial, friendship, romantic - none of them were anything to aspire too. Plus I hate cheating plotlines, so that was a two-fold disappointment. I thought the story had potential - I loved the skydiving elements, and the Guide definitions at the beginning of the chapters, but the characters let me down.

I received a copy of the book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc in exchange for my honest review.

"What I really wanted was to see what it felt like to not always be a good girl, to do something that would upset my dad if he knew about it."


Clancy works at her dad's skydiving business packing up the parachutes while she saves for college. A lot of the book happens at her dads business and is around skydiving in general. Her best friend Jules is also around a lot but doesn't always give the best advice when it comes to relationships. She also has a boyfriend who gets along great with her dad but doesn't always ask her opinion on things before asking about them. (This bugged me so much.) Then we also have Denny who is a skydiving student who Clancy becomes friends with.

Okay, so let's get to the not so great parts of the book first:

The communication between Clancy and her dad, not the best, but realistic in my opinion. For a change, a parent was involved, but he took helicopter parent to the extreme.
Clancy's boyfriend is rather controlling and it's obvious that they just aren't going to work out long-term.
Clancy's secretiveness and not telling the full truth about certain things that leads to some problems.


Now for the things I did like:

Clancy's friendship with the other people at her work.
Her friendship with Denny, it was really nice and I liked how Clancy really got out of her little bubble that he dad had made for her.
At the beginning of each chapter, there was a rule from the Whuffo's Guide to Skydiving which she had been writing since middle school.
How the loss of Clancy's mother was dealt with in a very real way for a lot of people (in my opinion) we avoid the topic in general or just glaze over it and that's what's happened for most of Clancy's life.
I also liked how Clancy mostly stuck to who she was deep down and didn't give into certain pressures.


"What I did know was that when people say your life can change in an instant, that's only half the story. It's not just your life that changes. It's you. You become a whole different person."

Overall I enjoyed most of this book. I read contemporary's for fun and if it has a realistic element to it I'm even more likely to read it. This book deals with three different elements a loss of a parent, an overly involved parent and relationship problems. These were done fairly well and in a realistic way, yet this book was still fun and a rather light read. I also liked learning about skydiving because I really don't know much about it and it kind of scares me and interest me at the same time.
I can't wait to see what Barrett writes next for YA as this one was pretty good.


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I liked that this book has been so light and easy to read, sometimes that's just what I need. On the other hand I feel that the story is kind of weak, especially in the romantic aspects



2.5/5 Stars

You can find this one and more of my review on my blog A Book. a Thought.


The book follows Clancy, she's a 17 year old girl who has always been the good girl in her family. Since her mother died in a skydiving accident her father has become overprotective with Clancy and due to all the rules that her father imposes on her and the protection of her boyfriend, Clancy wishes to break the rules and feel free just for the summer. This is how she meets Danny, (skydiving student and university student), and it's here when the lies begin. Clancy makes Danny believe that she's older than she really is, to avoid being treated like a litlle girl. But relationships begin to be damaged and the lies are too big to hold them


I honestly think that Clancy has a very immature attitude in the book, which is funny cause she's trying to show how mature and independent she can be and how she no longer needs to be permanently cared. And I understand the bad situation that the family has been going through and I also understand that because of that there are many feelings involved and maybe sometimes one can make wrong decisions because of this. But at the same time I don't feel that what Clancy does with her lies and behavior has a real justification. I think she just wanted to behave in a rebellious way, doing things that she normally wouldn't do, without reason. I also feel sorry for those people who got hurt without deserving it

When the romance grows based on lies and deceptions it's very difficult for me to feel that I want to continue following the couple, you know?. I think the big mistake of the book is to focus on an unhealthy romantic relationship


It has a good reading rhythm, even though I'm not satisfied with the plot in general I think it's very easy to read so I didn't want to stop highlighting that

Even though the romance was too false and meaningless for me, I liked another aspect of the plot and that is the family dynamics, it's quite good, I think that dialogs and tension moments between father and daughter can happen in real life, and that seemed pretty well developed to me. In addition, although the father's behavior may be too much for some of you, I personally understand his motives, the man lost his wife and now he has to raise his daughter on his own, the sadness is so clear, and I think that at the end of all he's just looking to protect his daughter


Denny is not a bad character, I think his individual life is quite interesting and I think he's the best character in the book, it's a pity that he hasn't developed in a deeper way

The whole Skydiving topic has seemed very interesting to me especially because I'm very interested in the subject and had no previous knowledge about it.

I'm not sure if I would recommend the book, maybe if you're at that stage when you want to read something light and not so important, then it's great! Also if you're in some kind of read-a-thon it can work, it's a very short book, so I think it's perfect for it

Interesting story but didn't really connect with the main character.

1.5

When I saw the cover and blurb of Freefall Summer, I thought it was going to be a story like Heather Demetrios’s [b:Bad Romance|29102896|Bad Romance|Heather Demetrios|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1475530166s/29102896.jpg|47434524], in which I mean I thought it would be a gritty observation on the effect an unhealthy relationship can have on a teen. I was wrong. I could tell by the time I was about five chapters that this was not a book about abusive YA relationships, and next I believed that this novel would romanticize relationships between a high-schooler and an adult (and yes – even though Denny is only eighteen, he is an adult) but I was wrong again (kind of). Thankfully. What Freefall Summer actually is is exactly what you would think from only looking at the cover: a YA romance that might not be super deep, and might be cliché, but is really easy to read. One difference between Freefall Summer and other YA romance’s is the inclusion of some questionably amoral content.

The characters and plot in Freefall Summer were taken right out of some classic YA contemporary cookie-cutter tropes: cute, innocent, blonde female has a dad who is nice but kind of controlling, and she also has a boyfriend who is nice but kind of controlling (and who bores her); aforementioned cute, innocent, blonde female meets a new boy, they deny their feelings for each other, she tries to decide if she should break up with her nice but kind of controlling boo, drama ensues. I’ve read it before and I’m sure I’ll read it again. One thing better in Freefall Summer was the addition of some fun subplots and facts about sky-diving. I now really want to go sky-diving. I thought it was kind of weird how obsessed Clancy’s dad was about sky-diving, but we all have our quirks.

But, unfortunately, not only was the plot cliché, but it was also realllllllly slow. It was easy-reading, so it was fine for me, but I didn’t feel that the plot really got going until I was about 60 percent in. So much about the blurb and the first few chapters promises that Clancy’s lies would bring her life crashing down but they really….. didn’t???? I mean, some stuff did happen because of her choices, but there really wasn’t any giant emotional scarring going on for anyone involved. It was disappointingly dull in the drama department. I was sitting there waiting for everything to get started and then, before I knew it, the book was over.

If you’ve read the blurb, you know that Clancy falls in love with this guy who is a freshman in college, and leads him to believe that she, too, is eighteen. This is literally the main plot of the novel, and yet their relationship was completely underdeveloped and lacking in chemistry. In literally any other book, a relationship between an eighteen year-old and a high schooler is either romanticized (hate this) or challenged consistently throughout the novel (good, it should be), and Freefall Summer kind of falls into the first category, but, honestly, Clancy and Denny’s relationship was so bland and undeveloped that there wasn’t really any content to romanticize off of. The one passage that I did highlight pertaining to their relationship is this:

”Do I wish now, knowing everything that happened next, that I’d told him I was in high school and only sixteen? Everything would have been different. Most people would say that everything would have been better.
And maybe it would. But even so, if I had it all to do over again, I know I’d let him go on thinking I was a college student and eighteen years old.”

Yeah. Weird. Not okay. And yes, Clancy was an idiot for lying, but, more importantly, Denny was an idiot for not putting the pieces together because there were some pretty obvious clues being dropped that Clancy was underage. When it comes down to it, the age discrepancy was really not challenged enough, even for such a weakly written romance.

My main problem with this book, though, is the demonizing/flatness of Theo and, more importantly, the acceptance of cheating. Theo was by no means a perfect boyfriend, but I felt as though his main purpose in the novel was to show that Clancy needed someone “mature” who “treated her like an adult” as a boyfriend, which brings us back to the inevitable problematic romanticizing of a statutory relationship. Which in itself is not okay, but Freefall Summer took this to a whole other level, and what really pissed me off is the way this book portrays cheating. Clancy is literally emotionally cheating on Theo with Denny for a good 60/70 percent of the novel, but when it is revealed that

Spoiler

Theo cheated on her while he was away at camp

, Clancy, and the book, uses this as a way to excuse Clancy’s emotional cheating, and implies that emotional cheating is an okay thing to do.

She even kind of admits that she’s emotionally cheating on Theo, with this passage: ”Also, I figured if I took [Denny] To Manuelito’s, no one who saw us would be suspicious, because if I was cheating, I wouldn’t be so public about it.” Uhhhhh. No. While reading, I just figured that Clancy would go through character development and realize that she was completely projecting her own cheating onto Theo and that she’d realize emotional cheating, even if you are planning on breaking up with your significant other, is wrong, but she never does. The book never challenges Clancy’s own cheating, rather, it does the opposite in Clancy’s projecting onto Theo, when she sees a picture of Theo with another girl and automatically assumes he’s cheating on her.

Spoiler

And it doesn’t matter that he was – it still doesn’t justify Clancy’s own cheating.

”Even though Cynthia’s jump had been awesome, it wasn’t enough to distract me from the picture of Theo. Why was he hugging that girl? Okay, maybe they were celebrating a hard climb or something, but th way she was leaning into him and he was squeezing her looked too cozy somehow.”

Like, girl, seriously. You just spent three chapters thinking about Denny and talking to your BFF about Denny and now you’re getting pissed over your boyfriend’s picture with another girl? Like???

There was also a kind of disturbing conversation between Clancy and her best friend Julia where Julia tries to convince Clancy to “play games” with Theo.

”It might be really good for your relationship with Theo if you dropped some hints about Denny. [sic] Even if you’re telling the truth, there’s no harm in making Theo think there is something going on.”
“I don’t see why, and besides, it’s childish to play games.”
“Oh, but playing games is fun! Why do you think they call it playing? Everyone does it anyway, and besides, it works.”

That whole conversation just made me really uncomfortable?? Idk. It’s just totally wrong to put forward the idea that telling your significant other things for the purpose of making them jealous or territorial is an okay and healthy thing to do in a relationship.

All in all, Freefall Summer is a a kind of typical YA romance read, but, at the same time, it’s slightly more problematic than most. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, really. It puts forth some not-so-good themes about statutory relationships and cheating.

I was provided an eARC by NetGalley in exchange for a complete and honest review.

While the summary and cover are beautiful the book falls a tad flat for me. The author makes the main character to ballsey and in your face. The plot is flat and most of the story revolves around her lying about some thing or another.
I think the idea was there but the execution just fell flat for me.
Those who want a more fluid story with not much up and down would enjoy this story.

This was a pretty amazing book!!

We are all struggling with different things like the main character in the book, but we all have to learn when to speak up and when to break boundaries. I went into this book thinking it was gonna be a suuuper slow paced book but it kept up quite well :) 4 Stars!