Owl Always Be Reading: Blog Tour + Review + Giveaway: Girl on the Brink by Christina Hoag

Title: Girl on the Brink
Author: Christina Hoag
Publication Date: August 30, 2016
Publisher: Fire & Ice Young Adult Books
Source: Publisher
Format: eARC
Age Group: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary

GOODREADS | AMAZON | KOBO

The summer before senior year, 17-year-old Chloe starts an internship as a reporter at a local newspaper. While on assignment, she meets Kieran, a quirky aspiring actor. Chloe becomes smitten with Kieran’s charisma and his ability to soothe her soul, torn over her parents’ impending divorce. But as their bond deepens, Kieran becomes smothering and flies into terrifying rages. He confides in Chloe that he suffered a traumatic childhood, and Chloe is moved to help him. If only he could be healed, she thinks, their relationship would be perfect. But her efforts backfire and Kieran becomes violent. Chloe breaks up with him, but Kieran pursues her relentlessly to make up. Chloe must make the heartrending choice between saving herself or saving Kieran, until Kieran’s mission of remorse turns into a quest for revenge.

Girl on the Brink is a debut novel filled with suspense, intrigue drama and real-life struggles. When I started reading the book, I truly found it to be engrossing and filled with realistic situations that could happen anywhere if we are not cautious with our hearts.

In the book, while conducting an important interview for her summer internship, 17-year-old Chloe Quinn encounters Kieran Dubrowski for the first time. While first-time meetings might not be full of sparks, this one was certainly filled with some intrigue. After the meeting, it is obvious that Kieran is obviously interested in her. And, Chloe is going through some struggles that could lead to her giving in to his heavy advances.

For Chloe, her life might be filled with some abandon. Currently, her brother and her bestie are both at camps, her mother escaping her marriage-related difficulties with meds and alcohol, plus her father is living with his new girlfriend in New York City, the Big Apple…with all these situations, Chloe is lonely and attention is just what she might need in her life now, and she seeks it eagerly and with passion.

In the end after some hesitation, Chloe not only agrees to go out with Kiernan, but finds his attention completely exciting like many teens would. She totally ignores his possessiveness, and thinks his violent temper can be changed. Coming from a broken home for Kiernan is hard and he seems like a sweet guy…so she stays with him. As her friends come to her worried, Chloe doesn’t listen…until things go awry and Kiernan’s behavior gets so out of control that she decides to end things…only to have things get worse and Kiernan blames her for the end in an aggressive manner. Will she ever be able to survive this relationship? We are eager to find out as we devour the book, which I did in a couple of days.

In the novel, we root and hope for Chloe to realize just how bad this relationship is, yet we really feel for her as she battles with his demons and her confusion. Hoag truly writes from the heart, with realistic and not frothy or overly idealized teen characters. While there are some subtle hints of Kieran’s attitude issues and problems, we do like him a lot in the start…and we relate to Chloe’s interest in him. As the book’s narrative unravels, we can agree that her abandonment issues is what led to her gravitating towards him and we hope that in the end the issue is resolved.

I recommend this novel, for it is realistic and engrossing. In the end, we learn a lesson and so will the young adult set about how dangerous this type of love can be.

Christina Hoag is the author of Girl on the Brink, a romantic thriller for young adults (Fire and Ice YA/Melange Books, August 2016) and Skin of Tattoos, a literary thriller set in L.A.’s gang underworld (Martin Brown Publishing, September 2016). She is a former reporter for the Associated Press and Miami Herald and worked as a correspondent in Latin America writing for major media outlets including Time, Business Week, Financial Times, the Houston Chronicle and The New York Times. She is the co-author of Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members to End the Violence, a groundbreaking book on gang intervention (Turner Publishing, 2014). She resides in Los Angeles. For more information, see www.christinahoag.com. write young adult novels, and have a special love for dystopian books. Ironically, I was born in 1984. Before becoming a full-time writer, I was an Art Director at a video game company. Now I shuffle around at home and talk to myself a lot. :) I graduated from the University of Southern California in '06 and currently live in LA, where I spend my time stuck in freeways.

ABOUT TEEN DATING VIOLENCE

Abusive relationships are widespread, cutting across socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, religious and gender preference lines. One in three high school girls experience dating violence, while more than half of college-aged women reported experiencing controlling behavior in a relationship. Eighty-nine percent of female college students said they were unable to recognize the signs of an abusive relationship, and a third of teens involved in intimate partner violence ever told anyone about it.

For more information, see http://www.breakthecycle.org/dating-violence-research.