No Spoilers. YA/NA Romance – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The summary talks of a tale of five friends, bonded in a tight friendship, one day Laney wakes up a sole survivor of a car accident that killed three of her friends. But this story is so much more than that.
In this story, we are following Laney’s mind as she loses a whole week from her life. We walk with her as she remembers pieces and the pain of losing those closes to her.
The grief you feel in the beginning is a lasting one, it’s as if your own heart has been ripped out. Danielle Simmons takes you on a journey to find a love you never knew was there, a beauty you never saw in the mirror and confidence you never knew you had. This story makes you question the friendships you’ve had over your lifetime and a relationship you’ve had with yourself.
Laney is the smart one, but the bond that sticks them all together, but she is also clueless of who she is to everyone around her. Always in her friend Lisa’s footsteps, she never stopped to think about what she wanted, what she needed and when she did, life changed for her. Her life was something to envy, but she never knew that.
This book was a romance I never knew I needed. It makes me look at love in a new way. Love is patient, love is dependable and love is forever. If you like romance, hell, even if you don’t, you should read this book, because it’s not your typical cookie-cutter love story, it’s so much more than that.
Purchase Evoke here:
Amazon B&N
About the Author
Danielle grew up in a small town in California’s Sierra Nevada Foothills. A voracious reader from an early age, she began writing poetry and short stories in elementary school, and continued that passion throughout high school and college. She studied literature, creative writing and communications at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, sons and two cats, where she is a PR executive by day, and
writer by night.
Author Links: Website| Goodreads| Twitter
Blog Tour Organized By:YA Bound Book Tours
She walked to school, while their daughters had a car and absolutely everything they wanted. Here’s where things change. The super popular guy that the sisters were obsessed with was a son of a therapist. He accidentally ran over her cat but did everything to make it up to her.
Sierra Burgess was a heavy set “outsider” in a typical high school setting. She was a band member and people generally didn’t notice or see her, minus Veronica, the head of the cheerleading squad, who is a rival of hers. So at the beginning of the movie, Sierra is seen posting adds with her phone number for tutoring. Veronica sees it and removes her phone number from the form.
Veronica is the typical mean girl from teen movies because she doesn’t believe in dating “losers” and thinks that a person’s friends define them. So when Jamey approaches her for her number she gives Sierra’s number because his friends aren’t her type and since he hangs with them, neither is he.
Now, Jamey starts texting Sierra who has never had a boy interested in her, nor was ever distracted from her work before. She begins to fall for him but decides not to tell him that she is not who he thinks she is. Basically, she is a catfish. She comes up with a plan to get him to think she is still Veronica when she finds out that Veronica’s college boyfriend thinks she’s stupid and dumps her.
How can we allow this kind of narrative happen in this day and age? I thought part of the movie was funny because it reminded me of the old 80’s movies and Dan kept asking questions like “Is being a cheerleader still a thing?”… Dan is Sierra’s best friend who tells her all the things I wanted to tell her. Like tell Jamey the truth and nothing good can come from lying.
To me, his wife, Debbie (Renée Zellweger), was the perfect mixture of love and grace. She was furious with him but eventually asked for her number. Told her she was not mad at her and that she forgave her. She said she hoped that one day she could find the kind of love that she and her husband had and hopefully if they got there again she would not be hearing from her husband again. – That was amazing. I could’ve never had the courage to say that.
One night his wife has a dream that she’s in a hospital bed, but she was sitting in the chair watching herself. She gets up and walks down a hallway that leads to a set of double doors. The doors open up to a field. She walks out the doors and a tall black man is standing there waiting for her, not in a romantic way, but in a saving grace kind of way. She tells her husband and they begin searching for him. Only when they find him, his nickname is Suicide (Djimon Hounsou) and he is a tough cookie to break through to.
This is Us, is an emotional story of a couple who had triplet, where one died and was replaced with a baby who was abandoned at the hospital. So they came with three in her belly and left with three in her hands.
Now with 8 Emmy Nominations the world is watching and the whole world is in love with Jack and Rebecca Pearson and their love for three beautiful babies. Seeing these babies grown with thier own problems and families shows us that what we does as parents matter. The mistakes, the things we thing we’re hiding, kids know it all.
The cast is amazing with Mandy Moore playing Rebecca and Milo Ventimiglia playing Jack Pearson. Their adult children are played by Sterling K Brown as Randall, Chrissy Metz as Kate, and Justin Hartley as Kevin.
As I hear the stories and then find out this movie is about to be made into a book, I pull it out my TBR, out of order, and begin to flip the pages. Yes I had the hardback book, and it made it that more important to me as I flipped the pages in reality. I am shaking as I am writing this, because this book is so realistic, so powerful.
This may be a work of fiction, but its not. Its the reality of being black in America. Being in poverty and feeling like you have no choice in your life decisions. In having white friends who go by everything that the media says, because their comfort is more important than our lives.
I don’t know how many times I tell people with children to stop coddling them. Introduce them to the real world and tell them how shit really is. If you put your children in a bubble, when they go to college, they wild out. This movie here is a straight up proof of how it normally goes, because its not always black and white, its grey areas in between.
Cute with Bad Qualities – I thought in the beginning was a horrible title, but I get it, Donovan was the “cute” one, and his qualities were horrible. Her being a “caged child”, she was easily open to the first guy that gave her attention. Her friends had a bet on how long she would be cool until she wilded out. It clearly didn’t take long.
This man disrespected her mother when he first met her, telling her excuse me, but me and Mya are grown, when she told him to take her straight home. And instead of taking her back to her dorms, like her mother asked, he took her back to his place where there was a bra in his bed, which he hid. They didn’t have sex that night, he played the role of the gentlemen, sleeping on the floor.
In the beginning, Mya, played by Samantha Smith, was a quiet girl who was a freshman in college. She was a private school girl who was raised in a strict religious home. She saw this boy and literally ran into Sheena, who invited her to a party that Donovan, Tasmin Williams, was supposed to be in attendance.
When her husband told her she was getting fat, she went to the doctors office and found out she was pregnant. He told her she should go and get an abortion. Something he knew she would not do, because she is very religious. In the next several scenes, you can see him celebrating graduation and hanging with friends while she goes to doctors visits and has the baby. He refused to even help out with the baby at night.
First off, let me say this. I need to give credit to Oprah Winfrey. She is a multi millionaire, but she is never afraid to play the role of someone real. She has no problem getting down and dirty and in this movie, where she plays Deborah Lacks, a woman who suffers from extreme anxiety and PTSD from the many ways that life has taken all it could from her. She was trying to find the truth about her mother whose cells were used to create HELA, where they took cells from a black (colored) woman and used them to reproduce and replicate. Her cells were used to cure all types of diseases but these cells were taken illegally.
This movie comes at a very important time in my life, as I struggle with my own health issues. Suzanna was losing herself. She was lost, confused, hearing and seeing things. She was looking up things online and self diagnosing, but the doctors said she was normal. Took one look at her age and said she was partying too much. She was a young pretty blonde college graduate and she was stereotyped as a party girl. This girl through out the movie didn’t have many drinks, even when she did go out. She was a workaholic, as most writers are. We are all searching for that one story that is purpose.
Her blood never showed any alcohol or drugs, but this is what they decided was her diagnosis. Until she had a seizure, followed by outrages of paranoia, and a few more seizures. The doctors ran all the test and everything was normal. They decided that they were going to have her admitted to a mental health facility. Some place that would heavily medicate her until she would die.
Tiffany M. Arnold 