'First & Then' by Emma Mills

From the BLURB:

Devon Tennyson wouldn't change a thing. She's happy watching Friday night games from the bleachers, silently crushing on best friend Cas, and blissfully ignoring the future after high school. But the universe has other plans. It delivers Devon's cousin Foster, an unrepentant social outlier with a surprising talent for football, and the obnoxiously superior and maddeningly attractive star running back, Ezra, right where she doesn't want them - first into her P.E. class and then into every other aspect of her life.

Pride and Prejudice meets Friday Night Lights in this novel, a contemporary YA romance about love—for the unexpected boy, for a new brother, and for yourself. First & Then comes from Emma Mills, the YouTube vlogger and co-creator of the popular "life skills" channel, "How to Adult" which currently has over 160,000 subscribers.

‘First & Then’ was the 2016 debut young adult contemporary by Emma Mills.

I’m really loving Emma Mills’ young adult stories – and I think a big reason that they work for me is her embracing and amplifying of relatable and ordinary teen stories.

‘First & Then’ follows senior Devon Tennyson soon after her cousin Foster comes to live with her family. Foster’s father died and his mother wasn’t capable of caring for him, so sent him to live with his uncle. Devon is adjusting to life with Foster, who has a very quirky way about him that’s both endearing and frustrating.

Devon is also nursing a crush on her best friend and football player, Cas – and finding herself thrown into mandatory gym class torture with her high school’s star football player and “all-America”, Ezra Lynley. 

Devon’s three relationships with these boys will intersect over the course of her final year of high school, in a range of surprising and crushing ways.

I saw this on Tumblr the other day, and I snorted because it’s 100% true;

But Emma Mills is in a category of YA authors who embrace the mundanity of high school and growing up – interspersed with the pain and awesomeness of it too. Mills actually writes about her characters doing homework, attending football practice, slogging through college essay-writing and just generally being teenagers. Sometimes this is amazing, and offers up the sorts of quiet revelations readers can actually relate to – other times you wish she’d stay in the bigger moments a little longer, like house party confrontations and homecoming dramas. But overall there’s something about Emma Mills and ‘First & Then’ that reminded me a little of ‘Saving Francesca’ by Melina Marchetta, for embracing the relatable and revelatory.

This is the year of Emma Mills for me – I started by reading her second book ‘This Adventure Ends’ in January, and I’m definitely reading her forthcoming ‘Foolish Hearts’ and now I’ve read her first. I am finding that Mills’ excelling at the ordinary can sometimes be a downfall too – as in ‘This Adventure Ends’ when I realised there was no actual denouement or satisfactory rise in action, but ‘First & Then’ does a much better job of that ordinariness overall, particularly when dealing with matters of the heart.

Devon is a big Jane Austen fan, so a lot of the romance is a hark back to the tangled miscommunications that Ms Austen so enjoyed, and it serves Mills well in this book;

“Listen, Dev …” 

Nothing good ever started with listen. It was never “Listen, you just won twenty-five thousand dollars.” “Listen, I have a huge crush on you.” I think the general theory was that you had to tell the other person to listen because you were about to tell them something they didn’t want to hear. And I definitely didn’t want to hear the end of Ezra’s listen, because it was probably something along the lines of “I hope we can still be friends.”

I will say that Mills wrote a few of her secondary characters a little too well, and I was frustrated at the end when I didn’t get conclusive resolutions or revelations about their hinted-at bigger stories – Jordan and Marabelle, especially – but maybe this means she has plans for sorta-sequels down the line?

What I especially loved about Mills embracing ordinary teen life in this book was the concentration on football and “jock” players that didn’t pander to extremes or clichés. The football boys Devon is friends with are nice and ordinary, lovable, goofy, cocky, egotistical … they’re not ‘Friday Night Lights’ or ‘Varsity Blues’ or parodies of high school football Gods, and they’re not the (perhaps sometimes more realistic) teen predators and misogynistic Neanderthals – they’re just guys, and that was actually surprisingly refreshing because they felt more three-dimensional, rather than props for stories with underlining moralistic preaching.

I’m really loving Emma Mill’s style, and I am looking forward to third book ‘Foolish Hearts’. Sometimes her embracing of the ordinary is a hit (‘Frist & Then’) other times it misfired (‘This Adventure Ends’) – but either way, she sure makes the journey enjoyable.

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4.5/5

'This Adventure Ends' by Emma Mills

From the BLURB:

Sloane isn't expecting to fall in with a group of friends when she moves from New York to Florida—especially not a group of friends so intense, so in love, so all-consuming. Yet that's exactly what happens.

Sloane becomes closest to Vera, a social-media star who lights up any room, and Gabe, Vera's twin brother and the most serious person Sloane's ever met. When a beloved painting by the twins' late mother goes missing, Sloane takes on the responsibility of tracking it down, a journey that takes her across state lines—and ever deeper into the twins' lives.

Filled with intense and important friendships, a wonderful warts-and-all family, shiveringly good romantic developments, and sharp, witty dialogue, this story is about finding the people you never knew you needed.

‘This Adventure Ends’ was the 2016 contemporary young adult novel by Emma Mills.

This was a really interesting book … one of those books that while you’re reading you really want to know what happens next, but at the end you can’t really recall what the actual plot was, only that you enjoyed it while it lasted.

Ostensibly it’s about a young girl called Sloane whose father is a Nicholas Sparks-esque author of tragi-romance and currently going through a writing slump. To help spark her father’s creativity again, Sloane, her mother, and little sister all move with him from New York to Florida in the hopes it will get the creative juices flowing. The move is really neither here nor there for Sloane, who has never formed truly meaningful attachments to anyone outside her immediate family … but then she finds herself the reluctant attendant of a house party with her new classmates, and sticking up for one called Gabe when a bully boy jock gets in his face.

From there, Sloane becomes the new pet friendship project of Gabe’s twin Vera (a social media sensation) and their friends Aubrey, Remy and Frank. When Sloane discovers that the twins’ artist mother recently passed away and that their new (pregnant) stepmother accidentally sold Gabe’s favourite painting of hers to a local art gallery, Sloane sets off on a mission to retrieve it.

This is not the book to read if contemporary fiction bores you to tears. But if you love the in’s and out’s of daily life and putting your emotions and typical teen dramas under the microscope, you’ll love this.

And while I did indeed enjoy the unfolding, I can’t help but feel this book lacked some necessary oomph. A lot of it reminded me of ‘How to Say Goodbye in Robot’ by Natalie Standiford, a lot of which was this really lovely meandering through quirky and off-kilter teen lives, but that eventually ratcheted up to a reveal and heavy hearted finale. In that sense too, ‘This Adventure Ends’ is like the days before in John Green’s ‘Looking for Alaska’, where it starts off unfolding in this very charming but lackadaisical chronological order until the middle sparks an entirely new trajectory … likewise ‘The Perks Of Being A Wallflower’ by Stephen Chbosky which is also up there for being very astute contemporary teen fiction, until the denouement starts picking at different wounds. And all these books – contemporary teen fiction – are throwbacks to ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ by J.D. Salinger, which to a certain point is also just a meandering stream of consciousness and encounters until it reaches a zenith of purpose and underlining meaning … and I think that’s what ‘This Adventure Ends’ was missing. A pack-a-punch denouement. True meaning.

There are even a few random threads of story established that go nowhere – like Sloane getting a job at a deli working with Gabe. There are pages establishing this, and then we never see her or Gabe at work again. Likewise, Vera’s social-media instagram fame is set-up as a somewhat crucial aspect of her character, but then it falls away. And I think these are two examples of a symptom of contemporary fiction that lacks real direction or message.

FanFiction also plays a role in this – as Sloane’s father gets hooked on a teen werewolf TV show and the fic that others writer for it. But – again – this doesn’t really go anywhere truly meaningful to entirely warrant its mention.

Still, I can’t deny that I did enjoy this book. Mills has a very true and candid way of writing. Her voice and dialogue work is particularly commendable;

“Everyone should have punched-in-the-face-for kinds of friends. Everyone should have … you know. Like the people you call when you need to hide the body.” 

“Why is there a body?” 

“If there was a body. Hypothetically.” 

“I’d like to avoid all forms of murder, including hypothetical.” 

He lets out a breath of laughter, and then: “I think everyone has it in them.” 

“Hypothetical murder?” 

“No. That kind of friendship. When they meet the right people. I think anyone can have that kind of friend or … be that kind of friend.” He looks off down the street. “Especially you. I think you’re a hide-the-body friend.”

… But I do look forward to reading a work of hers that has a real message. Something to say, when she’s so very capable of saying it so well.

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3/5