Art & Soul by Brittainy C. Cherry

Published: April 20th 2015 By: B Cherry Books

Genres: Young-Adult, Contemporary, Realistic-Fiction, Mental Health

Format: Kindle Source: Purchased My Rating: 3.5 Stars

Find It: Goodreads || Amazon

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.

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REVIEW

 Can we just take a second to admire that cover? That’s the first thing that I took notice of when I came upon this book. Then, the description got me curious. And finally, one of my blogger friends, Keionda Hearts Books, gushed about it in her review. I immediately one-clicked, but I’m just now getting around to reading it. While there were things that irked me, I still enjoyed the book as a whole. After some pondering, I decided that 3.5 stars would suffice.

Short summary: Aria ends up sleeping with her brother’s best friend, James, and ends up pregnant. Levi moves from Alabama to be with his dad in Wisconsin. Simon, Aria’s best friend, has OCD. Aria meets Levi, and a friendship – later relationship – is formed. Simon is added to the mix, along with Abigail, who ends up in a relationship with Simon. Well, a lot happened leading up to these relationships, so I won’t go into detail. Aria loves art and Levi loves music. Art & Soul it is.

I would have loved this more if the author had made Aria more likable. She was just so…. I can’t explain it. She held everything in, when she should have been letting it out. She wasn’t a bad character, I just wanted her to stop avoiding things to the extreme. She is all awkward girl with a cool hairstyle who got pregnant by a no good football player, James. He was a douche, so how the author chose to redeem him in the end didn’t matter to me. Once a jerk, always a jerk. I’m no fan of Aria’s situation, but as far as the decision she made – I fully support it. That may have been the best thing she did the whole story.

What did I love about this? Levi. Levi. Levi. I loved him the moment he opened his mouth. He reminds me so much of myself – hiding the pain behind smiles, and of course losing a parent to cancer. I felt so bad for him the whole time, but he was putting up one hell of a front. I knew all wasn’t as it seemed with his dad, and was glad to be right at the end. His mom was a whole other story altogether, so I won’t go there. Just glad she got help. It felt like too much was going on with him, and I didn’t like that much emotional stress put on one character. He already has enough on his plate with falling for a pregnant girl; everything else felt suffocating. It would have been a great thing to just see how his and Aria’s relationship grew, than all the other stuff thrown in.

Simon and Abigail are great supporting characters, and I love the friendship that formed between them all. Simon and his OCD are fighting battles here people. He’s such a great, but freakishly weird, character. Yeah, I totally just used an oxymoron. Whatever. There’s always going to be people worse off than you. No one knows what others are going through, unless they let you in. There was too much going on in this book for me. Teen pregnancy, OCD, Mental Health, Cancer, Infertility, and just your regular teen angst – too much to pack into a book with less than 300 pages. Everything felt rushed at the end.

I’m sure this won’t be the last book that I read from this author. I’ve been eyeing her others and I have added some to my must-read list. If you like realistic stories involving teens, then this one is for you. I think there’s something here for all ages, and surely most readers can sympathize with one or more of these characters. Recommended.