Even though one of the characters dies early on, this is a love story through and through. It’s the love story of Dylan and Ellis, but it’s also about the love between friends and the love we need to have for ourselves to really live.
The book opens with Ellis and Dylan making a big coming-out statement at their school dance. There’s a very positive vibe – until we learn this situation has been somewhat forced on them after someone anonymously posted a clip of them being intimate online. It seems they’ll overcome this – but as they leave the dance Ellis seems to be acting oddly. Something has upset him. He is distracted. Then, before we know it, they have crashed and plunge into a local lake. Ellis drowns, and Dylan is convinced someone rescued him but nobody seemed to be around when paramedics arrived at the scene.
Dealing with such grief would be awful at any age, but the doctor who treats Ellis makes a comment that shows even though things may still not be quite as accepting as they could be it’s still a huge improvement on the past. Perhaps not unexpectedly, Dylan struggles with his feelings after this – convinced someone left Ellis to die, so he determines to investigate and try to find out why.
Though there is an element of mystery to this, the fact we don’t really know what happened in the aftermath of the crash means we’re never sure what the mystery is to solve. Strange drawings turn up in Dylan’s mail and they seem to offer clues as to who might have played a part in Ellis’s abrupt change of behaviour.
As we watch Dylan piece together what happened I was very glad he had his best friend, Mike, looking out for him. An odd dynamic but, when it counted, they totally had each other’s back.
The last part of the book, where Dylan finally confronts the hideous truth about what happened to Ellis did come slightly out of nowhere. That’s not to say it didn’t ring true, but it was hard to reconcile the image we’d been given up to this point with the truth.
I liked the fact that Dylan was, eventually, able to start looking as if he would look back on his time with Ellis fondly. At times uncomfortable reading, but there was also a lot of positivity that I found quite uplifting.
Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read this prior to publication.