Review: My Life After Now by Jessica Verdi

Lucy just had the worst week ever. Seriously, mega bad. And suddenly, it's all too much—she wants out. Out of her house, out of her head, out of her life. She wants to be a whole new Lucy. So she does something the old Lucy would never dream of.

And now her life will never be the same. Now, how will she be able to have a boyfriend? What will she tell her friends? How will she face her family?

Now her life is completely different...every moment is a gift. Because now she might not have many moments left.

My Review:

My Life After Now is a good read that deals with an emotional topic.  It also a topic that is an important issue to be addressed.  It has a good story and characters which keeps it from being just about a message while still containing an important message.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD

Lucy is a good main character, a normal high school girl who just wants to be in her school play and get the lead role.  But then, she has an awful week.  She doesn't get the role of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and her boyfriend Ty breaks up with her so he can go out with another girl instead.  She and her friends, Max and Courtney, go out to a bar and Lucy gets drunk.  She makes a huge mistake by leaving the bar with a guy she doesn't know.  The next morning, she wakes up in bed with him.  Soon, she finds out that she got HIV from him.  This makes her life challenging since she worries about her disease.

Lucy's family are good, developed characters.  She has two dads, which isn't seen very often in YA books.  She calls one of them Dad and the other Papa.  Near the beginning of this book, her biological mom stays with Lucy and her dads because she is pregnant.  Lucy doesn't like her living with them.  She feels like Lisa, the biological mom, never really cared much about her daughter, so she doesn't really want her in her life at all.  Both of Lucy's dads clearly care about her, so naturally, they are upset when they find out that has gotten HIV.  They really want to help her through the illness so she can survive it and still live a long life.

Lucy has some good friends in this story.  Her friendships with Courtney and Max become rocky near the beginning of this book, when she withdraws and starts keeping secrets from them.  Then there's Evan, a guy who clearly likes Lucy, yet she is afraid of how he will react to finding out she has HIV.  His reaction when he does find out isn't unrealistic, though he does make some incorrect assumptions.  Then there's Roxie, who runs the HIV group meetings.  She has had HIV since she was born, and she knows a lot more about the disease than Lucy does.  She helps Lucy understand HIV better, and she really gets what Lucy is going through.

If you like YA contemporary, read this book.

Katie