Review: Torn Away by Jennifer Brown

Torn Away by Jennifer Brown (May 2014)

288 pages
Genre: Young Adult
Publisher: Little Brown, Books for Young Readers
Source: I won a copy of the book a long while ago from She’s Got Books on Her Mind as part of a blog tour. A big thanks to She's Got Books on Her Mind and the publisher!

Purchase: Barnes and Noble | The Book Depository | Amazon

Goodreads Summary: Jersey Cameron has always loved a good storm. Watching the clouds roll in and the wind pick up. Smelling the electricity in the air. Dancing barefoot in the rain. She lives in the Midwest, after all, where the weather is sure to keep you guessing. Jersey knows what to do when the tornado sirens sound. But she never could have prepared for this.

When her town is devastated by a tornado, Jersey loses everything. As she struggles to overcome her grief, she's sent to live with relatives she hardly knows-family who might as well be strangers. In an unfamiliar place, can Jersey discover that even on the darkest of days, there are some things no tornado can destroy?

In this powerful and poignant novel, acclaimed author Jennifer Brown delivers a story of love, loss, hope, and survival.

MY REVIEW

I loved it. I cried. I laughed. I felt the pain. I felt the love. I felt the desperation. I felt the hope.

Torn Away blew me away. Talk about a survival story that will do more than pull on your heartstrings. I don’t know if it is because I live in the Midwest or what, but this book just spoke to me.

I knew from the moment I read the first page that Torn Away was going to be emotional and that reading it was going to hurt. Torn Away gives us an up close experience of what it feels like to live through a tornado and the after affects of its wrath. From the sirens going off to the minute after it passes, to a week later, this novel touches on all of that.

Jersey survives a deadly tornado that hits her small town in Missouri, but her fight to survive during the tornado was only the beginning. In Torn Away we see what happens to a teenager when one tornado changes her life for good. The author got me to care so much about Jersey that my heart bled for her while reading. I wanted her to have a happy ending, heck, I just wanted her to find people that loved her and treated her right. Whenever her luck would get worse, I would pray that sooner rather than later her luck would finally change for the better. I got PISSED at the a**holes in this book. When you read this book you will get to meet these horrible people for yourself. Jersey grabbed my heart and never let go and I’m glad she didn’t.

The most important thing I took away from this book, what exactly it means to lose “everything.”

Torn Away is a beautifully written novel about a young girl just trying to figure out how to survive in a world where she loses the most important people to her. Read Torn Away if you haven’t yet, especially if you are already a fan of this author. I read this book in one day and I will read it again, once my heart as time to heal.