Review and Blog Tour: Wait for You

 Wait for You
by J. Lynn
Published by William Morrow
384 pages
Genre: Young Adult
Thanks to TLC Tours for the preview
 4 / 5


At the risk of repeating myself, yet again, I enjoy YA lit. And NA lit too, for that matter. I think both get a bad rap and that people tend to assume all YA books are Twilight all over again. We fans know how mistaken they are.

That isn't to say that YA and NA are bereft of crap; like all of literature, there is garbage out there. Poorly written, dull, uninspiring.

And then you get something like Wait for You, and you realize that all of your YA/NA praise is spot on.

I enjoyed this book so much.

The story is fairly basic: Avery has escaped her stifling, rumor-ridden Texas hometown and decamped to college in a small West Virginia town. Out of sight does not necessarily lead to out of mind, however; Avery may be attempting to run away from a catastrophic incident in her past, but she won't get very far. Before too long, she begins receiving - actually, she continues to receive, as she has been getting them for some time - threatening emails and phone calls.

Like a lot of college kids, Avery reacts by hoping she can ignore the potential danger. One very hot distraction lives right across the hall: Cam Hamilton. Even the name sounds like College Stud material, doesn't it? And Cam surely is. He is drawn to Avery, perhaps because she's the first person to dismiss and reject him. The two dance around each other, although we readers know that there is no real mystery here. Cam and Avery belong together. They even share having survived past traumas, albeit in quite different ways. As Avery begins to open herself up to Cam, though, she first needs to face what happened to her in Texas.

The characters are lovingly drawn. Avery is someone we feel we know. She makes foolish mistakes, she suffers from that sort of collegiate sense of superiority, and she is awkward and insecure. She understands herself enough to recognize when she is irrationally jealous, just as she knows when she behaves childishly. But we forgive her, and we continue to side with her, because we empathize with her. She went through something terrible, she survived, and she is desperate to regain control over her life.

Cam, too, is real to us. He's gorgeous and popular and everyone loves him, but he's also sad and somewhat tortured. He sees something in Avery, something that pulls him to her. He knows how to translate her and make sense of her. He knows she's worth the frustration ... to a point, anyway. And when that point comes, he reacts in a way we accept and support.

If the secondary characters are not as fully developed, that's okay, and it does not diminish how enjoyable the novel is. Avery's parents are straight out of Central Casting for Distant and Removed, and her friends could show up in any novel we read. Avery and Cam, though, are rich and fully realized. Their story keeps us reading and engages us.

You should know that some hot headboard rockin' goes on in this book. While not wildly explicit, sex dos occur. If it weren't for the sexy times, this would be classic YA. But those scenes - which are pretty hot, I've got to tell you - make it more NA.

For more information about J. Lynn, check out her website, Facebook page, and Twitter. Better yet, pick up a copy of this book. You will not be disappointed.