This was such a disappointing follow up to Until Friday Night for me. I think that having just lost my father when I read Until Friday Night I may have related to the main characters in that book as they had both lost parents as well. That may be why I was able to overlook so many of the flaws that I found with this follow up. I struggled through three quarters of this book before any part of the story held my interest. I was on the verge of not finishing it more than once. Only the satisfaction of knowing I finished it anyway is making me feel the slightest bit better about the time I feel was wasted on this.
In this unfortunate follow up, we are introduced more thoroughly to Gunner Lawton and Brady Higgins who were friends to West Ashby in Until Friday Night. We discover that the two of them shared a childhood friend who had left six years ago named Willa Ames. At various points in their adolescence both boys had crushes on her, but she left when they were all eleven before anything got awkward. Now she is back and has a dark past she is trying to recover from. Gunner is also dealing with his own twisted family secrets. The two of them understand each other much in the same codependent way West and Maggie understood each other in the first book. It's like the people in this town can only form relationships based on mutual self destructive behavior and shared pain. It's all very unhealthy and disturbing. More disturbing is the way the male characters treat the female characters in these books. The football players all sleep with the same girls and just pass them around without a care for the girls' feelings. They refuse to call any of these girls their girlfriends or form actual relationships with them beyond sex. Then when the girls want more the guys all call them clingy and treat them horribly to make the point that they aren't interested in them for anything other than sex. Girls are called bitches repeatedly for wanting relationships with the guys they sleep with. At least two incidents of rape were mentioned in this book and both women were called liars and bitches for trying to ruin the good names of the men they accused. Neither was believed and both were openly ridiculed. This sends a horrible message to anyone who has ever been a victim. Behavior like this is why rape so often goes unreported and in this book it is just glossed over and made to seem perfectly acceptable for all these guys to act this way. The misogyny was overwhelming.
Another less important issue I had was that the dialogue would sometimes stray away from how the character spoke throughout the rest of the story. The guys all cursed a lot and spoke like southern teenage boys most of the time and then would suddenly say something that sounded entirely too formal and out of place in the rest of the conversation. It happened numerous times throughout and it would seem so out of character it was almost silly. This is a much smaller complaint in the scheme of downplaying rape allegations, but it still bothered me.
Overall this was such a huge letdown for me. I realize now that my view of the previous book may have been tainted by what I had just experienced and that I may have emotionally bonded with the characters because the loss of a parent was so fresh for me. I had so looked forward to this, but now having had time to heal from my own loss, this story was so overwhelmingly bad that I don't even think I will be able to bring myself to read the conclusion to these companion novels. I'm not sure I want to revisit Lawton and it's disturbing trend of unhealthy pain filled relationships and the mistreatment of all the female characters who are not the immediate love interest. I need a shower to wash this one off. I do not recommend wasting your precious reading time on this when there is so much better material out there.
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