Until Friday Night by Abbi Glines

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Published Date: August 25, 2015

Buy Link: https://amzn.com/1481438840

Blurb: To everyone who knows him, West Ashby has always been that guy: the cocky, popular, way-too-handsome-for-his-own-good football god who led Lawton High to the state championships. But while West may be Big Man on Campus on the outside, on the inside he’s battling the grief that comes with watching his father slowly die of cancer.

Two years ago, Maggie Carleton’s life fell apart when her father murdered her mother. And after she told the police what happened, she stopped speaking and hasn’t spoken since. Even the move to Lawton, Alabama, couldn’t draw Maggie back out. So she stayed quiet, keeping her sorrow and her fractured heart hidden away.

As West’s pain becomes too much to handle, he knows he needs to talk to someone about his father—so in the dark shadows of a post-game party, he opens up to the one girl who he knows won’t tell anyone else.

West expected that talking about his dad would bring some relief, or at least a flood of emotions he couldn’t control. But he never expected the quiet new girl to reply, to reveal a pain even deeper than his own—or for them to form a connection so strong that he couldn’t ever let her go…

My Review:
Two teenagers dealing with more baggage than any typical teenager would carry, both dealing with their hardships in their own way – finding each other in the process. Add football, mean girls and good friends, and you’ve got a pretty decent YA.

What I Loved: The chemistry between West and Maggie was off the charts hot. And I knew it would be from the moment I hit play. West is an intense character, a bit more so than I am used to finding in a YA book. He’s a bit broody, and in some way a bit stereo-typical too (but he makes up for that eventually). I do love how much he loves and respects his family though, that sort of helped me through the first few chapters at least.

Maggie isn’t complicated at all, she is very much a typical teenage girl, she just doesn’t really talk. She is very caring and understanding of people around her, even toward her cousin and Aunt and Uncle. Mostly, I love how she is there for West and helps him deal.

I kind of fell in love with West, and Brady (Maggie’s cousin) and the rest of their circle of friends. Sometimes it’s the friend dynamic that really makes a book a little extra special to me.

Not So Much: This book started to feel long toward the end. Typically when you read a book there is a pretty clear arc in the story line, you reach a climax and things start to come back down. This book seemed to be more of a linear progression. There was progress made, for sure. The characters had issues they all worked through and there was a resolution, however there never seemed to be this grand moment/turning point in the book. I don’t think this is “wrong” but I do think that it might be why it felt a bit long after a while. More than once I thought things were getting ready to wrap up in the story (I was listening via Audio, and I don’t exactly watch the progress on where I am in the book) but then something more would start happening, and I would be like, ‘oh, we’re going to do this now…’

I already mentioned Maggie was caring and understanding and just had a good personality in general, however sometimes she came off as a pushover, while other times she stood her ground, then the next minute she was cowering. I get she’s a complicated person with a very, very complicated recent past, however I kind of felt like her character was a little inconsistent.

So the biggest issue in this book for me is a spoiler. I’m going to go ahead and …spoil…if you will, but you must scroll past the rest of the review to read it.

The Verdict: I don’t even remember what made me pick up this book. I think I saw a promotion for the next book in the series – and decided to check the books out. I really did enjoy most of the story, I enjoyed the characters a lot. This book, however, is not clean. There is sex, and while it’s not overly descriptive, it is descriptive enough. There is a lot of foul language as well. So, not my typical read – but I did enjoy it otherwise.

WARNING, SPOILER AHEAD…

(view spoiler)[ So my biggest upset in this whole book is that West is extremely overprotective, and possessive. At some point Maggie realizes how unhealthy this is – his reliance on her to get through his day, and the way he treats anyone who wants to talk or even look at her. Even her own cousin. While a little growling and marking of the territory (not literally…kind of) is fine, he does go over the line. And as I said, Maggie realizes it, and she does the right thing and asks for a little distance. The trouble is she waits less than a day before she takes his confession of love and runs with it. She takes him back in less.than.a.day. Yes, part of what she was worried about was that he didn’t really love her, he’d just become dependent on her…but she mentioned how over-bearing he was. He had no time to prove that he realized he was wrong. In fact, in the one conversation they had about it, he basically stated that he WASN’T going to change. So, I still think this is unhealthy. It was kind of worse when I believe in the epilogue Maggie indicated that her father was the same way with her mother. This is a classic thing that happens in families, we carry on a tradition of abuse, or fall into the same pattern as our parents. Now, I WANTED things to work out for Maggie and West, and am happy that they ended up together…but once that issue was addressed and touched on in the book, I really felt like it needed more time and more flushing out to create a healthy relationship. So, now I’m sitting over here a concerned/worried mother to these fictional teenage book characters…. (hide spoiler)]

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