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After a junior year of change and finding her place after a tragedy, Paige Hancock is now starting senior year. Her summer was happy and satisfying; she had the opportunity to attend a screenwriting program she had dreamed of and she got to talk and message long distance with the guy who became her boyfriend right at the end of junior year.
Now she is getting used to Max being her boyfriend rather than just a friend, and she’s trying to figure out where she wants to attend college. She’d love to go to NYU or USC or UCLA for film school, but those are far away and dream schools, and expensive to boot. Could she even get in? How will she afford them? How would she actually feel being so far from her family, her best friends … and Max? There’s a lot of BIG, important stuff on her plate, and she’s not sure if she can make the right decisions. As time goes on, Paige starts feeling her anxiety creep in, starting to cripple her, and that and her concerns about making “the right” decisions for her future start hurting her relationships with Max and even her best friends.
The Map from Here to There is a bit heavier than The Start of Me and You, which in itself had more heft than just a fun teen romance. Paige is facing anxiety and trying to figure out her future and is making more than one bad decision, and those are compounding her other difficulties, so readers get more angst and unhappiness than the first book and less of the fun and cute interactions between Paige and Max, Paige and her best friends, and the group that has evolved as a whole. It’s painful to watch her spiral but it’s real. She is lucky, though, to have support and is able to find her way through.
Not every teen has anxiety, but all teens at this age are facing many of the same issues, with senior year full of reminders that adulthood and all the big stuff are right around the corner. I enjoyed this book and being with the characters again and seeing them figure out a bit at a time what they wanted as the next steps toward their futures.
Rated: Moderate. There are one instance of strong language and occasional instances of mild or moderate language. Sexual content includes kissing and one scene that involves enough intense kissing (and maybe a bit more, though it doesn’t say) the teens are embarrassed by being caught by a parent. One character is passionate about making sure fellow teens have complete sex education, so a few explicit terms are used in a conversation that might not be typical in a YA book. There are a few references to teen drinking, including one scene where the main character gets drunk.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
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