Book Review: Such A Rush

Author: Jennifer Echols
Publication Date: July 10, 2012
Publisher: MTV Books

A sexy and poignant romantic tale of a young daredevil pilot caught between two brothers.

High school senior Leah Jones loves nothing more than flying. While she’s in the air, it’s easy to forget life with her absentee mother at the low-rent end of a South Carolina beach town. When her flight instructor, Mr. Hall, hires her to fly for his banner advertising business, she sees it as her ticket out of the trailer park. And when he dies suddenly, she’s afraid her flying career is gone forever.

But Mr. Hall’s teenage sons, golden boy Alec and adrenaline junkie Grayson, are determined to keep the banner planes flying. Though Leah has crushed on Grayson for years, she’s leery of getting involved in what now seems like a doomed business — until Grayson betrays her by digging up her most damning secret. Holding it over her head, he forces her to fly for secret reasons of his own, reasons involving Alec. Now Leah finds herself drawn into a battle between brothers — and the consequences could be deadly.

I have heard so much about this book that I had to pick up a copy for myself. I have always been fascinated with pilots and the call to be one; I just don’t think I could ever do it! The girl’s hair on the cover has the effect of being windblown which it would be in the air in one of the open cock pit planes that Leah flies. The cover is beautiful and the girl’s skin looks like porcelain. I believe that this is a good interpretation of Leah. Notice that the girl’s face is not shown and that her hair is hiding it, I believe that Leah tries to hide herself and who she is a lot of times. I really fell in love with this cover!

Leah Jones has led a hard and mostly abandoned life with a mother who does not do a great job of mothering her and who brings countless boyfriends to live with her and her daughter for weeks at a time. Leah is used to moving from trailer park to trailer park and is never truly grounded in one place. But maybe she wasn’t ever supposed to be grounded; maybe she was supposed to fly! At the beginning of the book I was not sure how I was going to like Leah because of her behavior mostly. I thought that she was going to use her situation as a crutch allowing herself to do things like drugs and drinking simply because she had been dealt a bad hand. And at first I believe that was her plan, to just be the trailer trash girl with no future. That is until she met Mr. Hall and got a job working for Hall Aviation. This is the point in the story where things changed, dramatically, for Leah!

I felt so sorry for Leah once I learned that she was mainly living in their trailer all alone. Her mom was always gone with her boyfriend of the week leaving Leah to fend for herself. I was heartbroken because Leah hardly had any money and what money she did have she chose to use for flying lessons. I was happy for Leah when she discovered her passion, however; and that need and drive she had to be in the air took away a lot of the pain I believe that she was dealing with. I also loved Mr. Hall who was her employer as well as her flying instructor. He became more of a father figure to her and she loved him dearly. He gave her hope in a time when she thought she was doomed to one day end up the same as her mother.

Leah also develops a relationship with Mr. Hall’s sons, who for most of the year live with their mother in Wilmington, NC. I don’t want to give a lot of the story away so we will just say that certain circumstances relocated then to Heaven Beach, SC to work at their father’s business. Mr. Hall has three sons but his twin boys are the ones that are directly affecting Leah. This is not a love triangle and I am sort of relieved that it wasn’t because I have almost gotten tired of reading them this year. Make no mistake that Leah was first and foremost attracted to Grayson. He was the rebel and the adrenaline junkie just like her so they fit so well together. He accepted Leah for who she was and knew that she came from a rough family as well as the rough side of town. He knew she would need protecting. What made Grayson so great was that he didn’t pretend to be some hero; he was just himself and sometimes he too was a little rough around the edges.

This is the first book I have ever read by Jennifer Echols (I know I should be ashamed of myself) but I must say that this lady is very talented and has a craft for spinning some exciting and totally tuned in stories. The setting of the book was probably one of my favorite parts just because it was where I wanted to be. Heaven Beach, SC was of course a beach town and was just one that I could totally capture in my mind. There was, of course, a rough side of town and a rich side of town but isn’t that true of everywhere? This was just one of those books that I could see what I was reading. Echols makes every instance she writes about very relatable and realistic. Echols took Leah’s one desire, to be a successful pilot, and used that to drive Leah out of the life she was in and change her mentality forever. Leah became a huge inspiration to me. This is not a book that you want to miss.