Saving June by Hannah Harrington

Saving June by Hannah Harrington
Release Date: November 29, 2011
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Source: NetGalley
Rating: Enjoyable

Harper Scott’s older sister has always been the perfect one so when June takes her own life a week before her high school graduation, sixteen-year-old Harper is devastated. Everyone’s sorry, but no one can explain why.

When her divorcing parents decide to split her sister’s ashes into his-and-her urns, Harper takes matters into her own hands. She’ll steal the ashes and drive cross-country with her best friend, Laney, to the one place June always dreamed of going California.

Enter Jake Tolan. He’s a boy with a bad attitude, a classic-rock obsession and nothing in common with Harper’s sister. But Jake had a connection with June, and when he insists on joining them, Harper’s just desperate enough to let him. With his alternately charming and infuriating demeanour and his belief that music can see you through anything, he might be exactly what she needs.

Except June wasn’t the only one hiding something. Jake’s keeping a secret that has the power to turn Harper’s life upside down again. - Goodreads

In the beginning, I found Saving June to be a very difficult book to get into. I’m unsure as to whether that’s due to the writing style or the characters themselves. I know, I’m a bad book reviewer.

That said, once the book got going it picked up, and I actually ended up feeling totally the opposite. I loved this book so much that it hurts. The last one hundred pages or so really picked up and improved and managed to hit the mark for me and made the entire book worthwhile.

Harper wasn’t the easiest character to for me relate with at the beginning of the novel, as we are total opposites. However, my view on her had done a complete 180 and I think that she was a great main character and overall I thoroughly enjoyed reading from her point of view. It was emotional and yet incredibly intriguing to read about how Harper was feeling after finding her sister dead in her car, and while I couldn’t say I knew how she felt from experience, Hannah Harrington does an excellent job of conveying her emotions through beautiful prose.

I also loved Harper's best friend, Laney, and Jake, a guy who knew June before she killed herself. They were both awesome characters, Jake in particular, and I loved the relationship that Harper had - or was building - with both of them.

The road trip overall was awesome, and despite it seeming like a light topic there were lots of deep issues thrown in along the way, the most obvious being suicide, of course. There were several scenes towards the end of the novel that caused me to burst into tears – much to the amusement of my mother – and said tears flowed until the last few pages.

The witty humour mixed in with the raw emotions was well placed and often caused me to switch from crying my eyes out to laughing in mere moments.

Saving June is a beautiful, heart wrenching debut by Hannah Harrington and I will be recommending this to everybody who wants an emotional and gripping read.