Nantucket Red by Leila Howland

Publisher: Disney
Release Date: May 13th 2014
Pages:  288
Source: Publisher
Age Range: Young Adult

Cricket Thompson's lifetime of overachieving has paid off: she's headed to Brown University in the fall, with a spot on the lacrosse team and a scholarship that covers almost everything. Who knew living in the dorm cost money? An Ivy League education seems to mean living at home for the next four years.

When Cricket is offered the chance to earn enough cash to afford a real college experience, she heads back to Nantucket for the summer. But the faraway island challenges Cricket in ways she hadn't anticipated. It's hard to focus on earning money for next year, when she finds her world opening up in entirely new ways-to art, to travel, and, most unexpectedly, to a future completely different from the one she has been working toward her whole life. A friendship blossoms with Ben, the gorgeous surfer and bartender who encourages Cricket to be free, even as she smarts at the pain of seeing Zack, her first love, falling for her worst enemy.

But one night, when Cricket finally lets herself break all her own rules, she realizes she may have ruined her carefully constructed future with one impulsive decision. Cricket must dig deep to fight for her future, discovering that success isn't just about reaching goals, but also about listening to what she's been trying to ignore-her own heart.

I was pretty surprised to find an e-galley of this book. Last year I have read and reviewed Nantucket Blue, and I was pretty curious how Cricket's story would continue. The book picks up where the previous one ended, a big plus for this one.Leila Howland did a good job reminding readers of the story without re-iterating the entire plot The story was not very fast, more like a relaxed summer pace. It's set in Nantucket, the weather is warm, and the pace felt right with it.   I think I liked Cricket more in this book. I feel like she grew up since the incident with Nina and Jules and Zach. She had more goals to work toward - better goals that trying to get Jay to notice her during the "elite" summer at Nantucket. Cricket worked her butt off as a waitress - something she has never done before (and as a previous waitress, that is not an easy job to just jump into) - and she went through all of her to-do's with particular outcomes in mind.

Plus, Cricket started to realize what SHE wanted to do, rather than what she thought everyone else thought she should do. Which is what she did in the first novel that annoyed me (among other things).
 
This is the perfect book to hand to a high school senior or anyone deciding what to do with their future. The summer after high school is such a tense, wonderful time of transition and readers get a good view of how this has an impact on a teen girl through Cricket's story.
This is also a perfect beach read, perfect for the fans of books of Sarah Dessen's Along For The Ride and The Story of Us by Deb Caletti. Let's hope there will be a next installment in this series which will show Cricket's life at Brown!