Really well written characters and storyline. Jesse the main character, lost her mother when she was 14 years of age. Her mother had cancer and she describes so intensely what that was like and how cohesive a unit she, her mother and her father had been before cancer threw the family into turmoil. The story will touch your heart. You will feel Jesse’s pain vividly as the author describes everything in Jesse’s world so well it is a virtual experience seeing things through Jesse’s eyes. The adored only child, Jesse, showered with attention until the ordeal they all went through with her mother’s terrible debilitating disease slowly stole her from Jesse and Jesse’s father. She takes the reader/listener on her journey through it all, then after her mother’s death instead of her father sheltering her and talking out each other’s pain, he withdraws into his work and begins going on business trips he had never gone on during her mother’s life. Jesse is trying to come to terms with her new life without her mother so she turns to her best friend and her best friend’s mother to help her cope. All the business trips turn out not to be business trips at all, instead, her father has reached out in his pain to another woman on line who recently lost her husband. Two years pass. The woman her father has met online is hugely successful in the film industry and makes way more than her father’s job would ever pay. Sharing their sorrow in the arms of someone who understands what the other is going through, they feel they are soul mates and fall passionately in love and on one of her Dad’s “business trips,” they ELOPE. Jesse is living in Chicago oblivious to what is going on with her Dad. He doesn’t share it with her. Jesse is trying to sort out her thoughts and feelings and get through her day to day life at school still mourning the loss of her mother and leaning on the love of her friends she has had since gradeschool. A close group Jesse finds solace there until the day her father hits her with the news he has married someone else and they are moving to Los Angeles. She never even knew he was talking to another woman. She is stunned. Then to be pulled away from the only comforters she has had during this tragedy she is in shock and cannot mentally process all the changes that are happening in her life so fast. She tries to resist the move and clings tearfully to her friends and what she knows and can depend on as solid in her life. Her father angrily tells her she doesn’t have a choice she is going and that is that. He hits her with another bomb – his new wife has a son Jesse’s age! What and whaaaaaaaaaaat? She is freaking out. Her father’s new wife is rich and has a glamorous home. Her son is used to getting his way and has no use for the new parental figure in the house – he was as close to his father as Jesse was to her mother. He makes it known Jesse and her Dad are not welcome and need to go. You can feel that whole Amityville vibe “GET OUT!” Jesse is thunderstruck. New life, new location, new school with pampered princesses and princes who wear only designer everything while Jesse is used to getting her clothes from thrift stores to save money. She tries to become as invisible as possible hardly eating anything and leaving as small a footprint in the new digs as possible. She tries not to get into conversations with her new stepmonsters. She is in agony and reaches out via text to her bestie in Chicago. The girls here make fun of her and she is desperate to get back home to the familiar and leave this nightmare world she has been thrown into, when she starts getting texts from a mysterious person who calls himself, “Somebody, Nobody.” He sees all the torture and bullying she is forced to deal with and he becomes her relief from the awful days at school. He mentors her in who to avoid and who would make great friends for her. He too has lost someone close to him recently so he knows the sorrow she is going through. She feels such gratitude to be able to text with somebody who gets her. She starts falling for this mystery man but he won’t reveal himself to her, he teases her with knowing where she is and what she is doing, his eyes are on her often, but, he prefers to remain a ghost. They begin a strange relationship that she is always trying to figure out his identity and has a lot of wrong guesses along the way with interesting results. Mysterious, and soulful, this book touches the reader on many different levels. It is a story you won’t want to let go until it is completed. Enjoy!
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