Review: Golden by Jessi Kirby

This book is part of my 2013 Young Adult Contemporary Challenge.

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Golden
Jessi Kirby
Publication date: May 14th 2013 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads - Amazon

Seventeen-year-old Parker Frost has never taken the road less traveled. Valedictorian and quintessential good girl, she’s about to graduate high school without ever having kissed her crush or broken the rules. So when fate drops a clue in her lap—one that might be the key to unraveling a town mystery—she decides to take a chance.

Julianna Farnetti and Shane Cruz are remembered as the golden couple of Summit Lakes High—perfect in every way, meant to be together forever. But Julianna’s journal tells a different story—one of doubts about Shane and a forbidden romance with an older, artistic guy. These are the secrets that were swept away with her the night that Shane’s jeep plunged into an icy river, leaving behind a grieving town and no bodies to bury.

Reading Julianna’s journal gives Parker the courage to start to really live—and it also gives her reasons to question what really happened the night of the accident. Armed with clues from the past, Parker enlists the help of her best friend, Kat, and Trevor, her longtime crush, to track down some leads. The mystery ends up taking Parker places that she never could have imagined. And she soon finds that taking the road less traveled makes all the difference.

Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Parker Frost doesn't quite know how to answer that question. She's lived her entire life following the carefully thought out plan her mother has for her: study hard, get good grades, get into Stanford, study some more.

It's when she's doing her TA job and helping her English teacher with a school project that she finds something that's going to change her life forever, something that's going to make her question everything she thought she wanted in life and for herself.

A moment was all it took to change everything.

We don't get just Parker's story while we're reading Golden. It's kind of a two-for-one type of deal: we read about Parker and how she struggles with taking charge of her life, and then we get little snippets of Julianna and Shane's relationship and the mysterious Orion who changed everything.

Jessi Kirby does a great job with combining those two aspects together, what happened with what's happening now and then trying to figure out what happens next. It was really satisfying to me as a reader to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together just as Parker did, and seeing how her figuring out what went by all those years ago made her start changing things in her own life.

Taking a chance can be worth a lot more than you know.

It's taking a chance that puts Parker in this mess, and it's taking a lot of other chances along the way that help her learn the kind of person that she is and the kind of person she strives to be. That's what I loved most about the book. Parker finding herself and going after what she believes in, getting back up on her feet after she fails and trying again.

Golden turned out to be just as great as I thought it would, and it's not really a surprise it made its way to my list of favorites books ever. I definitely recommend it to anyone who likes an amazing story with a rich plot and well-developed characters. You won't regret it.

[...] sometimes life gives us those rare moments where we do see a chance as it's happening. And in those moments, we have a choice. And sometimes we have to take a risk. And it's scary. It makes us vulnerable. But I know now that it's worth it.