Title: Discovering April

 Author: Sheena Hutchinson

 Genre: New Adult, Romance

 Published: March 10, 2015

 Series: Discovering Trilogy #1

 My rating: ★★

Synopsis

April Landau thinks she has everything she’s ever wanted. Her high school sweetheart, a house she can’t afford, her bipolar tabby cat, and she’s all set to begin her Junior year of college. Just when she least expects it, her life gets thrown for a loop. When things between her and her long time boyfriend unravel, she becomes stuck in a downward spiral of emotion. Finally, opening her eyes to the fact that she may have given up more than she ever could have imagined in this relationship. She finds herself struggling to keep her head above water.

Enter April’s next door neighbor— Jared Hoffman. He’s her complete opposite. A high school drop out who was forced to take over his parent’s business after their untimely death. It’s no surprise this tragedy affected him greatly, causing him to recede almost completely from society.

But he has one secret. A secret he’s been carrying around for years.

What happens when their worlds collide? Can an old friendship be the one thing that brings these two back to life?

A new adult love story filled with drama, sex, death, and the complications of all of the above. 

My Review

“You’ve said life is a series of choices, but I think it’s also a series of opportunities, a series of lessons, a series of moments all strung together that loops around into a lifetime— it’s a lifetime of moments. Every decision, every person that has entered my life, has shaped who I am today.”

– Sheena Hutchinson, Discovering April

What could have been a beautiful story about about self discovery, was really the story about a lost woman trading one emotional crutch for another.

The novel follows the life of a young woman named April who is stuck (by her own volition) in a toxic relationship. Being in this relationship, she’s lost all sense of who she is; her likes, dislikes, everything, that made her her. Jared, her neighbour helps her enjoy life, something she had forgotten how to do, and eventually, discover herself again.

While I do agree that April needed to find herself, and the process for doing that is always hard, some parts of her journey were a bit nonsensical. One of the instances of her not being herself was that she got scared in a haunted house. Then later, when she had “regained her fight”, she punched an employee of the haunted house for trying to scare her – you know, for doing his job. I don’t believe that finding oneself requires hurting people who are trying to do their jobs, especially when the reason you’re giving for your actions is the satisfactory performance of the service that you’ve paid to enjoy. What did you expect when you went to the haunted house?

“New Adult” seemed like a facade when faced with the immense immaturity of the characters.
April, with her incessant shouting, zero self respect and her treatment of other women like trash.
Eric, with the way he treated April because he couldn’t adequately process his own feelings.
Hunter, with his inability to just break up. This applies to April as well.
And Jared. Honestly, I did not expect it from him. While he did treat April like a child, which made him a little less likable, he was still my favourite character. By the end of the book he had lost that status. I can’t rant about it the way I want to without giving away major spoilers, so I’ll just say this – his behaviour in the end was not acceptable. Him forming premature assumptions (or just dumb justifications for his actions), punishing April for something that wasn’t even wrong with drastic (and overly dramatic) measures and then making her grovel was forgiveness was not only incredibly immature, but also morally wrong. What he did was just wrong.

Secondly, in breaking her dependency on Hunter, April increasingly grew dependent on Jared. She traded in one crutch for another. Had she really discovered herself and had a morsel of self respect within herself, she would not have apologized and gone crawling back to Jared. She never really took the opportunity to find herself; the reason she lost herself in the first place was because she spent all her time doing activities that Hunter enjoyed, instead of things that she enjoyed. She did the same with Jared. They never did anything that was her idea; It was all Jared. She did what he planned for them to do and hung out with his friends when he wanted them to. She had a total of one friend, a very superficial relationship that was never given any time to fully develop; April only interacted with her friends a handful of times throughout the book and never spent time with her friend and Jared together.

While April did seem to start enjoying life more by the end of the book, I beg the question; Were her preferences really her own? Did she really ‘discover April’?

The reason I’ve given this book two stars, as opposed to one, is because reading about Jared and April’s relationship occasionally proved to be cute.
But the only memorable thing to come out this book was the tattoo design that stemmed out of the quote I used at the beginning of the review.

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About the Author

Sheena is a born and raised New Yorker, who followed her happily ever after to a much more rural town in Maine. When she’s not driving an hour to find a Starbucks or running from bugs that are way to big for her taste, she’s focusing on writing stories that empower and inspire.

Sheena always roots for the underdog, believes in love at first sight, and that everyone should have their happily ever after.

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