A Different Blue - Review

A Different Blue

By: Amy Harmon

Published: March 29th 2013 by Createspace Independent Publishing

306 pages

Genre: Young Adult/New Adult, Contemporary

Source: Personal Kindle Library

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Goodreads description--Blue Echohawk doesn't know who she is. She doesn't know her real name or when she was born. Abandoned at two and raised by a drifter, she didn't attend school until she was ten years old. At nineteen, when most kids her age are attending college or moving on with life, she is just a senior in high school. With no mother, no father, no faith, and no future, Blue Echohawk is a difficult student, to say the least. Tough, hard and overtly sexy, she is the complete opposite of the young British teacher who decides he is up for the challenge, and takes the troublemaker under his wing.

This is the story of a nobody who becomes somebody. It is the story of an unlikely friendship, where hope fosters healing and redemption becomes love. But falling in love can be hard when you don't know who you are. Falling in love with someone who knows exactly who they are and exactly why they can't love you back might be impossible.

(This review was written in September 2017.)

I've been in a reading slump for a little while. This seems to be a theme for me during pregnancy. I believe that to be due to a lower tolerance to things that annoy me. I just happened to snag this Amy Harmon book as a freebie a while back. She's a new author to me this year, but I've read 3 books by her already. Two of these three books I rated 5 Stars. So I felt pretty confident that Amy Harmon would be a good choice for getting me out of this book slump.

I have to say that in the very beginning of A Different Blue I was struggling. Even at one point I wondered if I would end up liking the book at all or if it would just end up not being for me. Blue isn't in the best mental space and the majority of the book during this section switches between memories of Blue's past and growing up as well as history lessons from her very hot British teacher. I almost felt like I was back in school myself. And I'm not usually a fan of books that jump around chronologically. So this portion of A Different Blue was a struggle for me.

Once I got to the middle section of the book I was hooked. As a matter of fact, Amy Harmon had me straight bawling for a bit. I mean I'd like to say that the majority of these tears are due to pregnancy hormones, and that's likely true to an extent. But since becoming a mother, this section would have broken my heart pregnant or not.

The description pretty much tells you so this isn't a spoiler, but I was wondering how Amy Harmon would work a teacher/student relationship in such a way that the reader wouldn't take issue with the couple. Yet she pulled it off. For me at least. Wilson and Blue have such a slow building relationship. At first it's very student/teacher yet antagonistic. But Blue graduates early on in the book and their relationship moves more into the mentor direction until they slowly become friends and very, very slowly turn into more.

Amy Harmon has a way of weaving in some spiritual topics in way that doesn't make her books "Christian" or even feel as if she's trying to project a particular idea, belief, or theology onto the reader. I very much appreciate this. I can read her books without feeling like I'm being preached to yet I get a bit of the warm and fuzzies from these aspects.

Favorite quotes:

-"History is written according to what men believe, whether or not it's true."

-"What label do you want for yourself? How would you label yourself if the labels weren't based on what you thought of yourself but what you wanted for yourself?"

-"Someone told me once that to create true art you must be willing to bleed and let others watch."

-"When it's all said and done there are so many worthy causes, so much work to be done, so much good to do, but if we sacrifice everything for a cause, we tend to become a spokesperson instead of a lover, an organizer instead of a wife, a mouthpiece instead of a mother. I gave everything else away in the name of a greater good, but look how many people I hurt. Look at the ripple effects of thinking my life's work was more important than the people in my life."

I struggled with A Different Blue in the beginning. The middle tore my heart to shreds, and the ending was what I needed it to be. I did have a few questions that weren't answered, but nothing that involved the major pieces of the puzzle. Though I initially wondered if A Different Blue would end up being the one Amy Harmon book that I didn't enjoy, she pulled it off. A Different Blue gets 4.5 Stars. Have you read A Different Blue? What did you think? Let me know!