Ashley Schumacher
YA Contemporary Romance
Everyone else in the tiny town of Enfield, Texas calls fall football season, but for the forty-three members of the Fighting Enfield Marching Band, it’s contest season. And for new saxophonist Anna James, it’s her first chance to prove herself as the great musician she’s trying hard to be.
When she’s assigned a duet with mellophone player Weston Ryan, the boy her small-minded town thinks of as nothing but trouble, she’s equal parts thrilled and intimidated. But as he helps her with the duet, and she sees the smile he seems to save just for her, she can’t help but feel like she’s helping him with something too.
After her strict parents find out she’s been secretly seeing him and keep them apart, together they learn what it truly means to fight for something they love. With the marching contest nearing, and the two falling hard for one another, the unthinkable happens, and Anna is left grappling for a way forward without Weston.
A heartbreaking novel about finding your first love and what happens when it’s over too soon. Ashley Schumacher’s Full Flight is about how first love shapes us—even after it’s gone.
-Excerpt taken from Goodreads.
Check Goodreads to see the book’s ratings.
My Opinion
“To love,” he says, “is to always know that it can be taken away. The pain is in the having, because you know exactly what you stand to lose.”
(4 / 5) Schumacher has once again grabbed my heart! Contemporary + romance + YA is a genre I tend to stay away from. However, on a whim (beautiful cover- I’m a sucker!) I grabbed the audio to her debut last year, Amelia Unabridged (Macmillan Audio) and absolutely adored it. At 2 for 2, I will for sure read everything this woman writes.
“It was better, I thought, to be alone by yourself than to be alone surrounded by people.”
We meet Anna who is struggling through her junior year of high school, trying to be the amazing saxophone player that she’s promised she is. When she scores a duet with Weston James, she knows she needs to step it up even more. He is naturally gifted in all music but is also made out to be the guy the town has very little good to say about.
“I think the world hurts us in a lot of different ways,” he says, his words a breath along my ear. “But I also think the antidotes can be enough to make you forget there was poison in the first place.”
It was reminiscent of high school and first loves and captured the feelings I remember having so often. Both teens were broken, both were fixed for a time then life came crashing back in. I could feel the tragedy coming just around the corner and I knew it would be devastating. Schumacher’s writing is almost poetic, practically lyrical at times. It instantly grabs me and envelopes me in the story like very few authors can.
I highly recommend checking out this one!
General content summary: F words: 16, divorce, kissing, teen intimacy (no details other than clothes coming off then going back on), death, grief.
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the gifted copy in exchange for an honest review.
The book releases February 22, 2022.
**As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
That’s so fun to be surprised by a good read!
Not into contemporaries so much but glad you liked it!