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.
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About the Book
Full Flight
by Ashley Schumacher
Publishing 22 February 2022
Wednesday Books
Genre: YA Contemporary Romance
Page Count: 320
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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.
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My Review
My Rating: 3.5 Stars
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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.
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