The Secret Year (2nd blog)

Leah Duplessis
         
                                                               The Secret Year
    The Secret Year, by Jennifer R Hubbard, is a very complex romance novel. The baseline of the story is pretty simple; It is about a young, poor, and not very popular high school student named Colt, who had been seeing a wealthy, beautiful, and one of the most popular older girls in school, named Julia. They were seeing each other for a year, when Julia's accident occurred. She was riding in the passenger seat of her best friends car, and when she got into an accident Julia died almost instantly. As tragic as this situation was, it was a lot worse for Colt because of his big secret. He had been seeing Julia for that entire year, however not a soul knew besides for the two of them, and Julia had a rich jerk of a boyfriend the entire time. The story begins very strong and easily acknowledges the reader of this situation, however the rest of the story is revolved around Colt's life and how he copes with everything beyond the day of the accident. The thought of Julia eats away at Colt each and everyday, and he becomes deeply obsessed with her, and a journal which she had wrote to him over the course of the year that they were seeing each other. Her brother Michael had came across the journal and when he discovered who it was about, he gave it to Colt. He reads this everyday in hopes to make him feel whole again. The tone of the book changes significantly whenever reminiscing on the relationship between the two or when direct entries from the journal are read. It becomes a very dark and romantic tone, where as the rest of the novel is kind of laid back and just includes random aspects of Colts every day life. When the tone changes to romantic it becomes very risky. The relationship is described very intimately and is very straightforward about sex scenes. The writing done by Julia which we read when it publishes entries from her journal, are very corny and unrealistically romantic, especially for two high school students. The side stories which happen throughout the book are most times insignificant and a little hard to comprehend; however there are a few events which support the whole point of the story and are very important. This includes events such as Colt confessing to Julia's best friend about their love affair in order to find out specific details from the accident for closure. Colt also experiments with another woman, only to compare her to Julia and eventually break it off because "there was someone else", and that someone else being a deceased Julia. As I continue to read the novel it makes me wonder where the book is going and what the main point of the story actually is. Colt ends up starting to fall for another girl, who was actually Julia's brother Michaels ex girlfriend. I felt as though this did not spice up the story in a good way, it really just stirred the pot and drew away from the baseline of the story. It also makes Colt look like a bad person, and that makes you wonder what type of person he may be in general. Overall I am more than halfway through with the book and I don't quite know where the author is going with the story, or when the turning point will be. Im straggling along trying to figure out when the climax is coming or if it already passed.