Such a Rush by Jennifer Echols

Summary:
A sexy and poignant romantic tale of a young daredevil pilot caught between two brothers.

High school senior Leah Jones loves nothing more than flying. While she’s in the air, it’s easy to forget life with her absentee mother at the low-rent end of a South Carolina beach town. When her flight instructor, Mr. Hall, hires her to fly for his banner advertising business, she sees it as her ticket out of the trailer park. And when he dies suddenly, she’s afraid her flying career is gone forever.

But Mr. Hall’s teenage sons, golden boy Alec and adrenaline junkie Grayson, are determined to keep the banner planes flying. Though Leah has crushed on Grayson for years, she’s leery of getting involved in what now seems like a doomed business — until Grayson betrays her by digging up her most damning secret. Holding it over her head, he forces her to fly for secret reasons of his own, reasons involving Alec. Now Leah finds herself drawn into a battle between brothers — and the consequences could be deadly. (from GoodReads)

Review:
For some reason, I have never read a book by Jennifer Echols, but after reading Such a Rush, I realize how much I've been missing out. Jennifer Echols is a very good author and she adds a lot to the contemporary genre.

Such a Rush was a lot different than any other book I've read, especially since it involved flying planes. Everything about the planes was well-researched, and reading about Leah up in the air made me want to learn how to fly a plane, too. I thought the airplanes were the best aspect of this novel, especially as it highlighted Leah's desire to make something of herself and to get out of their small town.

All the characters were interesting, and throughout the whole book I wanted to know their motivations. The mystery with Grayson and why he's blackmailing Leah was particularly engaging. His reasoning made sense, but the fact that the summary says that "the consequences could be deadly" was a little over the top.

The protagonist is an important part of any story, and I'm glad to say that I really enjoyed reading about Leah. She grew up poor with an absent mother, but she was able to overcome her upbringing by the end of the book.

Overall, I thought that Such a Rush was a fun read about a very interesting topic that usually isn't covered in YA fiction. Now I can't wait to read the rest of Echols's novels.

Rating: 8 out of 10.
FTC: received from Flamingnet Book Reviews.
Release Date: July 10, 2012

2012/MTV Books/320 pages