Skip to content
  • Home
  • Review Policy
  • Linktree
  • Contact
  • Menu Item
  • Menu Item
  • Menu Item
  • Menu Item
Westveil Books

Westveil Books

& Other Hobbies

  • Home
  • About
    • Meet Jenna
    • Review Policy
    • Linktree
  • Book Blog
    • Book Reviews
    • TBR
    • Old Posts Archive
  • All Bookish Posts
    • SciFi & Fantasy
    • Horror
    • LGBTQIA+ Books
    • YA Fiction
    • Historical Non-Fiction
    • Misc Fiction
    • Misc Non-Fiction
    • Canadian Authors
  • Everything Else
    • Artsy Things
    • Rainbow Things
    • Other Hobbies
    • Neurodivergence
    • Chit Chat
  • Contact
  • Toggle search form
  • Colouring Book Review: Fantasy Coloring Book by Weblight Dreams Book Reviews
  • With the Fire on High – 5 Star Book Review Book Reviews
  • Jati’s Wager by Jonathan Nevair – 5 Star Book Review Book Reviews
  • Shadow’s Voice by Natalie Johanson – 4 Star Book Review Author Interviews & Guest Posts
  • The Outworlder by Natalie J. Holden – 5 Star Review Book Reviews
  • The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson – 4 Star Book Review Book Reviews
  • She’s the One Who Won’t Behave – 4 Star Book Review Book Reviews
  • Antithesis – 5 Star Book Review Book Reviews
  • Book Review: Astrid Falls by Andrew Cownden Book Reviews
  • The Final Constant – 4 Star Audiobook Review Book Reviews
  • Flames of Rebellion – 5 Star Book Review Book Reviews
  • She’s The One Who Cares Too Much – 4 Star Book Review Book Reviews

Full Flight by Ashley Schumacher – 3.5 Star Review

Posted on February 12, 2022 By Jenna No Comments on Full Flight by Ashley Schumacher – 3.5 Star Review

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.

I was granted eARC access to Full Flight by Ashley Schumacher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the publisher’s employee who sent a widget! I absolutely adored Amelia Unabridged, so this was a welcome surprise. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

Please note that this post contains affiliate links, which means there is no additional cost to you if you shop using my links, but I will earn a small percentage in commission. A program-specific disclaimer is at the bottom of this post.

About the Book

Full Flight
by Ashley Schumacher

Publishing 22 February 2022
Wednesday Books

Genre: YA Contemporary Romance
Page Count: 320
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

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.

Amazon US | Amazon CA | Amazon UK

My Review

My Rating: 3.5 Stars
Consider liking my review on Goodreads.

Rating: 3-3.5 Stars

I was granted eARC access to Full Flight by Ashley Schumacher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the publisher’s employee who sent a widget! I absolutely adored Amelia Unabridged, so this was a welcome surprise. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

I really wish I could rate this book higher because the last 15% are full of the amazingly moving emotions and stolen innocence moments that made Amelia Unabridged so great. I feel like this might have been a completely different (and stronger) book if the first 85% had been only 15% and we got a lot more of the fallout. (I’m being vague because I don’t want to spoil the plot.)

The first 85% felt far too slow and drawn out, and I think that’s because I wasn’t particularly connected to either POV character. If I’m being completely honest, I didn’t even realize for a good 15-20% that one of the POV characters was male, and I wasn’t sure whose parents were divorced and whose weren’t. Anna and Weston felt like the same person in the beginning. This is probably why the insta-love didn’t work for me this time, either. Again, if we could have condensed Anna and Weston before “the event” into a much smaller percentage of the story and really sat in the fallout and explored the post-event character growth, I think this would have been stronger.

Another thing that might have improved this book for me would be more from the side characters. Ratio seems like a really interesting guy but I didn’t even realize he was part of the story until the last quarter. (And again, he plays such a big part of that post-event fallout story. Had the timeline been arranged differently, we would have got more of him.)

I think it’s entirely possible that I just don’t get a lot of the smaller parts of this plot because I’m not American and I was a never a Band Kid™. This book does seem to let that identity archetype do a lot of legwork and assumes the reader went to school in a typically American public high school. Schumacher’s previous book, Amelia Unabridged, didn’t. It took place outside of school months. It dropped “the event” early and followed the important characters in the fallout for most of the story. It ended on a turn toward a brighter future that felt familiar without needing to know what it’s like to be an American high school student. Full Flight, on the other hand, chose to focus on the leadup to “the event,” put most scenes on the high school campus, and end on a kid still in high school and only just starting to figure out how to move on from said “event.”

There’s a lot of attempted symbolism in this book that didn’t work for me. We get Anna’s thoughts on a last-of-the-species bird in the very beginning, a character catches an update on the discovery that it was not, in fact, the last of its species in the event, and I think Anna and Weston may have briefly commented on this bird to each other somewhere in the middle, but it isn’t the effective symbol of grief and hope I think Schumacher intended it to be. There’s also a snake in the epilogue and I briefly thought it was an afterward rather than an epilogue and Schumacher was reminiscing about a pet that might have provided some sort of inspiration to the story until the character interacting with the snake said something that made me realize the story wasn’t quite over. Stars were clearly supposed to be very important to Weston and it’s a big deal near the end of the book but I also didn’t get that reference either. For as much as I think this book was too long and slow for where it ended and wish it followed a different timeline, I also feel like key scenes were missing that might have hung a bigger hat on those symbols.

I can see the characters we parted with at the end of Full Flight making excellent POV characters for a follow-up story, either right where this book leaves off or a short way into the future. This hasn’t discouraged me from reader more of Schumacher’s work in the future, but this isn’t going to be the Schumacher title I tell everyone to read.


Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
  • Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp
  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

Book Reviews Tags:3.5 star review, Ashley Schumacher, contemporary romance, Full Flight, netgalley, romance, Wednesday Books, ya, young adult

Post navigation

Previous Post: Wishcraft by Ali Lucia Sky [Blitz with Excerpt]
Next Post: Big Bad Beast by Grace Goodwin [Blitz with Excerpt]

Related Posts

  • Koush Hollow by Leigh Goff – 4 Star Audiobook Review Book Reviews
  • 5 Star Review: Max and the Citadel of Light by John Peragine Book Reviews
  • Sherlock Holmes & the Remaining Improbable – 3.5 Star Review Book Reviews
  • Such a Pretty Smile – 3.5 Star Book Review Book Reviews
  • Act Cool by Tobly McSmith – 5 Star Book Review Book Reviews
  • The Only Good Indians – 3.5 Star Book Review Book Reviews

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

We migrated web hosts and we're still working on restoring images. Thank you for your patience!

Badges

Professional Reader
Reviews Published
80%
50 Book Reviews
NetGalley Beta Tester
Frequently Auto-Approved
Intellifluence Trusted Blogger
  • Archive Feed
  • Author Interviews & Guest Posts
  • Blog
  • Book Promos
  • Book Reviews
  • Book Talk, Tags & YouTube
  • Bookworm Things
  • Chit Chat
  • Featured-Old
  • Horror
  • Main Feed
  • SciFi & Fantasy
  • TBR
  • YA Fiction
  • July 2025
  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Original content © 2021-2025 Westveil Books | Submitted content rights remain with the rights holders.

%d