This Is Me Trying by Jenna Adams - Review and Blog Tour

Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for This Is Me Trying by Jenna Adams. It is a pleasure to welcome you here, especially because it's the first day! I only finished this book on Monday night! I really wanted to get it finished for today so that I could write a full review of the book, because it's a long book and it's really dense, and I really want to know how it ended. 

So, the book is told from the points of view of Brooke and Matt. At the start of the book Matt is seventeen and Brooke is fourteen. Matt has been part of Stagefright, a drama company for teens and young adults for a while, but this is Brooke's first year. The play they are going to put on is Romeo and Juliet. Matt is Romeo and Brooke is Juliet. They obviously have to work very closely together and Matt manages to bring Brooke out of herself. She's a bright, vivacious teenager. She lives with her mum and her sister Amy. Her dad is American and he's pretty absent from her life generally. She has a best friend, Lucy, and is close with Lucy's brother, Callum. They are also in Stagefright.

Matt lives with his parents and has a few close friends. He is in the sixth form, and Brooke is only in Year 9. He has feelings for her, and they kiss a couple of times. Matt knows how it will look, though, so he asks Brooke to not tell anyone about it. A couple of times they are nearly caught. Matt eventually breaks up with Brooke but a bit later they meet up and they have sex. It's illegal because by this point Matt is eighteen and Brooke is not yet fifteen. 

Matt feels terrible. It is hard to not sympathise with him, actually, but as an adult I know that this is really wrong and that he should have left her alone. Brooke comes to that realisation too. I really liked how this was portrayed. She is incredibly hurt and slips into a deep depression that lasts for her whole teenage years. She self harms and she's very miserable and when she's 18, she leaves. 

I liked both Brooke and Matt and felt a lot of sympathy for both of them. They don't have this amazing romance. They do have issues. A lot of young girls will have been through something similar to Brooke, I am sure, which is terrible, because it is terrible, but it does mean that I was happy to see this reflected in a novel. I would definitely read something else by the same author. My only criticism really is that I wouldn't necessarily call this Young Adult. New Adult, maybe? I dunno. It's a hard one because both characters grow up and become adults in the book. But I'm giving it four out of five. 

Thank you for having me on this tour. I was provided with an electronic copy of this book for the tour but was not otherwise compensated for this post. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Have a click around and read some of my other reviews!