Review: Keep Holding On

Goodreads Summary: A romantic and empowering book about bullying

Noelle's life is all about survival. Even her best friend doesn't know how much she gets bullied, or the ways her mom neglects her. Noelle's kept so much about her life a secret for so long that when her longtime crush Julian Porter starts paying attention to her, she's terrified. Surely it's safer to stay hidden than to risk the pain of a broken heart. But when the antagonism of her classmates takes a dramatic turn, Noelle realizes it's time to stand up for herself--and for the love that keeps her holding on.

I didn't think I was going to like this book when I started it. [Man, that seems to be happening a lot lately...] The main character felt really young [I might just be getting old] in her tone and whiny. But then I started reading more and I realized that she really wasn't, she was telling it the way it was. The whiny tone I heard in her story wore off and I began to really see things and start guessing at them and reading into them and discovering why Noelle's life is the way she was. 
 
I'm not much for morals. The really obvious kinds anyway and this story has them, but it made them work. You don't feel preached to the way that you can when morals are imposed on a story. Probably because they aren't really "imposed" exactly in this one. Its a girl's story but it feels real and by the end of the story it feels as if she has told you her story, she has told you where she was and how she got to where she is and the ending...her last words to the reader just wrap things up SO WELL. I loved the ending. 

A quick read at just over two hundred pages, you'll fly through it in a few hours if you have the time and it does what the author set out to do, or at least what I see/think the author set out to do which is to tell a story of bullying and to do just what the title suggests, keep holding on.

4/5