Mills, Emma. This Adventure Ends. Macmillan/Henry
Holt 2016 308p $17.99 ISBN 978-1-62779-935-5 hs Realistic fiction VG-BN
This Adventure Ends is a light, fun, and quirky read. Starting with the initial impression it
gives, the cover art is beautiful and will certainly attract readers from the
shelf. Sloane moves to a new town and
immediately falls into a group of friends that is populated with wonderful,
heartfelt, funny, and realistic characters.
Emma Mills’s character development is superb. Each character is fully rounded, endearing,
and hard to let go of. The reader feels
emotionally attached to even fringe characters and is invested in the various
subplots. While there is a romantic bent to the storyline, its heart is in its
depictions of friendships -- the attachments, betrayals, confusions and
loyalties between these friends, which for most readers will reflect the
relationships in their own lives.
Beyond her friendships,
Sloane is also dealing with complexity within her own family. Her father is a very well known but blocked
romance writer who pulls from his own life to build his characters. The relationship between him and his wife,
Sloane’s mother, is complicated and tense.
These two issues — the marital relationship and the struggling artist —
impact Sloane in various ways.
In part, this story is one
of adventure. Sloane is trying to
recover a painting that means a great deal to her friends, and on the way she
finds some very real connections with her group of friends and her family that
help her reflect on the magic of all the relationships in her life and the
various meanings and forms of love.
Summary: This Adventure
Ends is the story of Sloane: new girl to a quirky group of friends,
daughter of a romance-novel writer, singer, and skeptic of love. Sloane is on a quest to recover the sold
painting of her best friend’s deceased mother, and along the way she learns the
beauty of friendships, family, and love.
Friendship-Fiction,
Love-Fiction —Michele
Nass
No comments:
Post a Comment