Review: When We Collided by Emery Lord

When We Collided by Emery Lord
Publisher: Bloomsbury Childrens  
Publication Date: April 7th 2016
My rating: 3 stars 

Seventeen year old Jonah Daniels has lived in Verona Cove, California, his whole life, and only one thing has ever changed: his father used to be alive, and now he's not. Now Jonah must numbly take care of his family as they reel from their tragedy. Cue next change: Vivi Alexander, new girl in town. Vivi is in love with life. A gorgeous and unfiltered hurricane of thoughts and feelings. She seems like she's from another planet as she transforms Jonah's family and changes his life. But there are always consequences when worlds collide …

When we Collided was a beautiful read, I normally don’t gravitate towards books where there are broken characters and by coming together things actually seem to come hopeful. But Lord really reeled my in with When we Collided that the grief and hurt that our characters had to go through really made me want someone or anyone better for them. My heart really went out to Jonah and the situation he found himself in, he was only young and had to shoulder so much of the responsibility for covering up the fact that his mum still wasn’t 100%, and then manage everything else on top of looking after his siblings. No one should ever offer to deal with that and overcome the grief too. So I’m glad that Vivi rolled into his life the whirlwind that she was, her energy was soon picked up by Jonah’s siblings and she made them hopeful and believe that things could be okay. Jonah and his family really deserved every bit of happiness they could get, but I couldn’t get my finger on what was up with Vivi, there were glimpses in her past and hints in the present day story, so by the time things kicked off I’d wished that we’d known sooner, just to prevent a lot of the heartache along the way. But you could say that this was the wakeup call Vivi needed to deal with the problems she had been burying and to get her life back on track. 

I loved the family dynamics that Lord incorporated into this story, Jonah’s family was an absolute delight to be around, they were a crazy bunch, but each bought their quirky personality to the story. I liked how the whole town would get together when support was needed or even to celebrate a birthday of a newcomer. The family and community closeness really worked well in bringing out positive vibes and a goofy smile on my face, when things looked grim.

Like I said before When we Collided was a beautiful story, Lord really weaved a gorgeous story that dealt with so many issues really well. But I think this book just failed to evoke an emotional reaction out of me as I’d anticipated and that’s the only reason I can give for not rating this book any higher. Also the ending in particular was unexpected, I had no idea things would end that way. But these minor grievances’ aside When we Collide is a book I would still highly recommend, just so readers can experience Jonah and Vivi’s beautiful story for themselves.