FLIRTING WITH DEATH'S GRACE

A troubled teen gets a second chance at life and another chance to fix things with the girl of his dreams in Swann’s young adult romance.

Asher Jacobs feels alone. He’s mostly ignored by his divorced parents (and his dad is planning on moving across the country), and he had a falling out with Grace King, his crush and longtime friend. He develops drug and alcohol dependency and has a casual affair with a troubled girl named Vikki. He meets an angel of death named Kali who takes an interest in him and warns him not to go to the old quarry where he likes to hang out. Not long after this first encounter, he brushes with death again when Vikki feigns throwing herself off the side of the quarry; he runs after her (not heeding Kali’s warning), soon finding himself dangling off the edge of a cliff. As Asher works to tackle his addiction to drugs and alcohol, and he and Grace become closer, fate threatens to pull the pair apart. Swann has a talent for vividly imagining the world of an alienated teenage boy, and the glimmers of hope she gives him are completely apt. Her prose, from the opening line, “I had a date with a death angel once,” to one devastating three-word chapter toward the end of the book, is deftly crafted and engaging—perfect for young adult readers ready to be immersed in a serious work of fiction. The narrative, however, is not without its defects. Asher’s road to recovery, while true to the nonlinear nature of overcoming alcoholism, drags for most of the book and can still be a chore to read, while some of the twists in the end don’t feel especially earned. This is a serviceable romance about redemption, but there are certainly other novels that tackle the same themes with a tighter plot.

A few great moments shine in an otherwise uneven book.