Review | The Living by Matt de la Peña

[TheBookNerdEmily]

Rating:♡♡♡♡♡ 5/5 hearts
In a world where YA novels are dominated by plain saltine female leads, Shy is a fresh breath of air.
Amazingly this novel is set over a time period of about 8 days. Starting out, I thought this book would just be a nice survival story. BOY, was I wrong. It starts off with Shy reliving a traumatic event that occurred on the last voyage off the cruise ship he worked on. Other than the prologue, it had a nice light start, average big softie friend, hot unattainable friend, just average teenage boy stuff right? You know, other than the man in the suit following him everywhere….After that things take a dark turn, the mysterious Romero disease, why everybody cares so much about what exactly David Williamson said before he jumped, and the creepy guy in the suit that’s following Shy at every turn. But, that stuff leaves his mind as he gets closer the aforementioned hot unattainable friend Carmen, who btw has a fiance back home. After sharing a drunken kiss, Shy takes a surprisingly mature stance of friendship. There! Everything’s fine now right? WRONG. They find out about the earthquake, and the tsunamis while Shy and two others are stranded in a life raft in the middle of the ocean and the story hasn’t even really started yet.
All in all, The Living was a book that surpassed every expectation I had set for the book , and continued to do so.