My Best Everything: Is It Enough?

 When her father loses her college tuition money in a business deal, Lulu convinces her best friends to make and sell moonshine to raise quick money over the summer. Lulu wants to escape from her job at a salvage yard in her small Virginia hometown and she needs to get our of her house where her agoraphobic mother can’t even go outside. Lulu loves her best friends but ultimately wants to leave them behind. The summer after graduation, these teens are each facing their own challenges while they take a huge risk together. Even in the best case scenarios for their summer plan, no one has their sights set as high as “happily ever after.”

The understated suspense and desperation of their situation is always present. Making illegal moonshine whisky, of course the teens face the threat of the law. But local or federal agents are less scary than the foreboding threat of the other moonshiners in town, who are still less scary than the potential for a still explosion, or drinking bad moonshine, or alcoholism. So much can go wrong that everyone is living on the edge and waiting to see if anything can go right.

In another layer of suspense, from the very beginning, Lulu is telling the story to someone, addressing that person throughout as “you”. We find out soon enough that she is speaking to Mason but we don’t know why he isn’t there to hear the story directly.

Corn, sugar, yeast, heat, and time -- these are the elements needed to make moonshine, and also the ingredients that make this novel of the heartbreaking circumstances of rural generational poverty a highly enjoyable and compelling page turner.

What would you risk to ensure your shot at a better future --  your family, your friends, your life, or your heart? Lulu is risking it all in My Best Everything by Sarah Tomp.

The truth? I had to skip to the end of this book because I was so stressed out about whether Mason was missing or comatose or dead. And I never skip to the end. This is an EXCELLENT read if you like YA fiction, teen romance and coming of age stories.