Hold

???Hey, Elliot? Your girlfriend was right. I had a sister, and now she???s dead, so now I have a dead sister.???

3 stars not because I'm meh, but because there's a lot of really good stuff, but some other things that did not work for me. I'm glad I read Hold because of the really good stuff.

Let me do my issues first. The synopsis seems like the story could go a couple different ways, or a combination of both. This made me interested in reading about Luke's loss of his sister, and how his ability to stop time might be related.

But there's very little about his sister. (What's there is is so good.) And there's very little, honestly, about his stopping time. He can do it, it comes up occasionally, but the book would not be that changed without it. Anything garnered from it could have been done another way. I don't need a lot of external action in my books – weird labeling stopping time as action – and love a lot of more literary stuff, but the middle of this book often felt like not much was happening on any level.

There are very few adults, to the point that I have to imagine it's somewhat deliberate, but this felt unnatural and like a bunch of lost opportunities. Luke's mother is a depressed woman we only glimpse, mostly on the periphery in flashback. Eddie's mother is a fearful woman, who we only glimpse. Luke had one conversation with his dad, I think. Other parents and teachers are mentioned, briefly. I don't truly know what Luke thinks about his parents, because he rarely thinks of them at all. Which make me laugh out out at the line: “Luke had almost forgotten Eddie had parents.”

While I liked the participants in the central romance, I cannot say I felt the chemistry. Sorry, sorry! Both of them are terrific characters.

Multiple sentences had missing words, which might not be a big deal to a lot of people, but this stood out.

The good stuff is I really liked the characters, with my fave being Marcos, who made me laugh the most. The friendships were strong, and well-written. Lots and lots of diversity and acceptance of one another in the core group. Appreciated the portrayal of how the school prided itself on being culturally sensitive when it was a hotbed of microaggressions, and how this led to ... events ... and how that became a bit of an exploration of how PoC are perceived and imperiled based on that perception.

I would definitely read more by Rachel Davidson Leigh. Some of my issues were based on feeling the synopsis set me up for something else, and so I think I would have done a little better with it if this hadn't been the case. I want more characters like these! More Marcus!