COMING UP FOR AIR

A teen romance is soured by the opioid crisis.

High school junior Hadley Butler aims to complete her adolescence with as little fuss as possible. Her older sister, Remy, is the one with all the drama, seemingly on a mission to date every bad boy in town. Hadley’s much more content to spend her time with her friends Ty and Becca and keep her eye on becoming an artsy photography student at a prestigious liberal arts college. But when the high school swim team’s star, Braden Roberts, enters her orbit, Hadley lets her guard down as the pair embark on a seemingly standard teen love affair that slowly goes sour. After an injury, Braden starts taking painkillers instead of going through a time-consuming surgery, and this shortcut leads him down the path of opioid addiction. Tyndall lets this element of the story develop slowly, smartly laying out the pace of a relationship poisoned by substance abuse. Readers are effectively led into this conflict; they will not roll their eyes and presume to know better than Hadley what is going on. The author also skillfully and with depth develops the bond that Hadley and Braden share. This maturity is the novel’s greatest asset, fully rendering a complicated relationship with empathy for both parties. Hadley and Braden are both presumably White, and there’s a bit of diversity among their friends.

An absorbing love story for the 21st century.