Book Stop Corner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” 





Lexa Hillyer, an American author, pens her debut novel, Proof of Forever that traces the moving tale of four girlfriends and their camp days but two years down the line, they grew apart and are given a chance to go back to their camp days and do it all over again.




Synopsis:

Before: It was the perfect summer of first kisses, skinny-dipping, and bonfires by the lake. Joy, Tali, Luce, and Zoe knew their final summer at Camp Okahatchee would come to an end, but they swore they’d stay friends.

After: Now, two years later, their bond has faded along with those memories.

Then: That is, until the fateful flash of a photo booth camera transports the four of them back in time, to the summer they were fifteen—the summer everything changed.

Now: The girls must recreate the past in order to return to the present. As they live through their second-chance summer, the mystery behind their lost friendship unravels, and a dark secret threatens to tear the girls apart all over again.

Always: Summers end. But this one will change them forever.


Zoe, Joy, Luce and Tali were once the best of best friends who spent their last summer before graduation at Camp Okahatchee, where they had incredible fun and made lots of promises. But two years later, they all drifted apart in their own worlds, and so floated so far away from each other that they hardly ever talked to each other. One fine day, Joy, the girl who disappeared from the group two years back, manages to plan a reunion at Camp Okahatchee and her plan of bringing all together becomes successful when the rest of the girl agrees to go on summer camp one more time. But a photo booth changes their lives forever, when they are transported back in the time when they were seventeen and were camping out like nobody's business, and if they have to come back to their present, they have to re-create that special day, which sounds bit difficult given the fact that they were not that close anymore.


From Hillyer's bio, I read that her poetry collection, Acquainted with the Cold, has won the 2012 Foreword Book of the Year Award's Gold Prize for Poetry, and that proves that why her writing style is so lyrical, beautiful and her prose is like a soft music playing in loops whose melody sways the readers with it's flow. The evocative narrative tone sets the mood of the readers right into the moment, and when I'm saying moment, I mean to say, summer. Hillyer have vividly recreated the beauty, the flair and the feel of the summer with her choice of eloquent words. Although the book falls in the YA genre and so most people might take it as another of cheesy teenage drama story, but surprisingly, the quality of this novel is so rich that it feels like reading a literary fiction.

The author have unraveled the mystery behind the girls' animosity and the reason behind their drifting apart from each other by peeling one layer after another which peaked my interest and kept me engaged with anticipation, until the very end, which I felt a bit rushed and was not completely structured to wow the readers with the beauty, and at times too, especially midway through the book, the secrets that the girls harbor became very predictable and anybody can easily guess it away.

The plot is layered with fun, humor and emotions which are depicted with enough depth to make the readers feel the joy and the pain with equal vigor. The emotions vary with the story when it is summer, then the author lets us have fun with the charm and glitter of the weather and the fun lurking in the air and the smell of friendship and warmth, but when they re-visit that summer, then the author takes us on a emotional over-ride with the girl's path to self-discovery, embracing truth and finding one another.

The characters are very realistic and each appears to be a stark contrast from one another. Zoe with her nerdy demeanor will simply make the readers adore her, Tali is a bit of a bitch when it comes to men and money and well she annoyed me with her attitude in the begining of the book, Luce is the perfect exemplary figure among these four girls, but there's a lot of mystery behind that one, and finally, Joy, the only sane person in the group who doesn't like to speak off her mind a lot, and the mystery behind her disappearance from the girls' lives play a huge role in this story. Told from the POV of the four girls, lets the readers see past through the fears, inhibitions, flaws, feelings of the four protagonists.

Overall, this is a story where four girls re-discover themselves as well as their bond of friendships that is so deeply moving that in the end, even though it is bit rushed, is bound to bring a tear to the eyes of the readers. This is a captivating yet funny story of love and friendships that perfectly captures that salty taste of summer through this story.


Verdict: Here comes your perfect summer read!! Grab a copy now.

Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Lexa Hillyer's publishers from Harper Collins for giving me an opportunity to read and review this book. 
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Author Info:
Lexa Hillyer is the author of Acquainted with the Cold (Bona Fide Books), the 2012 gold prize winner of the Foreword Book of the Year Award for Poetry, as well as a recipient of the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Proof of Forever, a debut young adult novel which will be published by HarperCollins on June 2nd, 2015. Her work has been featured in Best New Poets 2012, and she has received various other prizes and honors for poetry. Lexa earned her BA in English from Vassar College and her MFA in Poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She worked as an editor at both Harper Collins and Penguin, before co-founding boutique literary incubator Paper Lantern Lit. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and a very skinny orange tree. 
Visit her here


Book Purchase Links:

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