Review: Art & Soul by Brittainy C. Cherry
8:34 PM
Art & Soul
By Brittainy C. Cherry
I had always been the invisible art student in high school. Passed by. Glossed over. Unnoticed. Now I was Aria Watson… that girl.
After one bad decision, and being labeled a slut, I was no longer unseen. I was the whore. The ignoramus. The tramp.I would never be invisible again.
Particularly to Levi Myers. He was the odd boy with the beautiful soul who accepted and understood the broken girl inside me.Falling in love wasn’t the plan. But how could I resist his promises of hope? Of forgiveness? Of a future I had stopped dreaming of?We were shattered. We were scarred. We were something strange and beautiful.
We were two lost souls holding on to the only thing that could keep us together.
Each other.
I know when I open a Brittainy C. Cherry book that I'm going to have, what feels like, my heart chewed up and spit out. Why do I continue to do this to myself? Because her writing grabs hold of me and won't let go. I adore Brittainy's characters and that there is always a family aspect in her books, good or bad. Weirdly in most Young Adult books, there is a lack of family life.
Art & Soul is about two teenagers trying to navigate adult situations. Told in dual POV, we meet Levi who is moving to Wisconsin to reconnect with his absent father and escape his overbearing mother. Then we meet Aria who is keeping a major secret from her family. The two met when Aria takes a short cut through the woods to get home, she notices a guy talking to a deer and attempting to feed it berries. Deer boy. Aria is standoffish in the beginning but quickly grows to like Levi. Maybe a little more than she cares to admit given her current situation.
This book could have easily been a cliche, an invisible girl is noticed by drop dead gorgeous boy, kind of story but the author didn't do that. Instead, she took those cliches and put a new twist them. These teens deal with some hard real-life situations. The only thing that seemed a little unlikely was the relationship between Levi and Aria. I've never met a sixteen-year-old boy that would insert himself into the situation that Aria is in, but this is fiction. I did like that their relationship wasn't something that happened overnight. It's slow burning, and that's what kept me reading.
"Being around him felt like being around someone who saw your scars and called them beautiful when you only see your past mistakes."
Brittainy tackles some pretty difficult topics in Art & Soul, one those being mental illness. I appreciate that she was able to capture the reality of mental illness without being disrespectful or over-the-top. She also showed how mental illness affects the family as well. It's heartbreaking but gives you a little insight.
Art & Soul is a great book with fleshed out characters and packs a punch.
Reading Playlist:
0 comments