Read of the Week: Anything to Have You by Paige Harbison

Nothing should come between best friends, not even boys. ESPECIALLY not boys.

Natalie and Brooke have had each other’s backs forever. Natalie is the quiet one, college bound and happy to stay home and watch old movies. Brooke is the movie—the life of every party, the girl everyone wants to be.

Then it happens—one crazy night that Natalie can’t remember and Brooke’s boyfriend, Aiden, can’t forget. Suddenly there’s a question mark in Natalie and Brooke’s friendship that tests everything they thought they knew about each other and has both girls discovering what true friendship really means.

This book is fantastically wonderful. Sure, this sort of situation has been played out before. Say, Something Borrowed, anyone?

This is what I expected, but what I got was a much more Mean Girls version that is so much better than Something Borrowed could have ever been, as much as I love it with most, if not all, of my soul.

But, you ask, what makes Anything to Have You so different, and yet, so great? The mega plot twist, that’s what. Yes, I may could-have would-have seen it coming, like many that have read it did, but it was still not expected as not a single hint (I felt) was left on the back flap. 

But, it is things like that, that make books worth reading: little things, or big, in this case, that are not mentioned on the back of the cover. I’m running Anything to Have You  for best unveiling. Also: currently my favorite plot of 2014. It’s turning out to be such a better book year than 2013, I can’t help but feel jumpy.

This book has one of my favorite characters to date. Brooke, who is the parallel of Something Borrowed ‘s Darcy, and is what I would like to refer to as the world’s biggest fucking colossal bitch. But, surprising enough? I loved her, possibly more than I loved Natalie, only because Natalie is too much like me for me to actually sit there and enjoy her. Some parallels just hit too close to home. *laughs timidly*

Natalie was admittedly pretty darn great, though, and much more relatable to the vast majority of teenagers beside Brooke, who targets a much smaller percentage. She was so sweet and I felt so much for her that I found myself near tears time and time again. Aiden and Reed were both wonderful  in their own ways, and they really contributed to the texture of the novel. I probably should have hated Reed but he ended up being one of those guys and I wish, wish, wish, we’d gotten more of him out of the novel and I hated seeing him go, though I did like where Brooke ended up at the sum of things.

This is one of those greatly scandalous, though oddly humble, reads anyone and everyone is going to love.

Rating: 10/10