Review: The Truth About You and Me

Title: The Truth About You and Me
Author: Amanda Grace
Publisher: Flux Books
Release Date: September 8, 2013
Format: eGalley

Madelyn Hawkins is super smart. At sixteen, she’s so gifted that she can attend college through a special program at her high school. On her first day, she meets Bennet. He’s cute, funny, and kind. He understands Madelyn and what she’s endured – and missed out on – in order to excel academically and please her parents. Now, for the first time in her life, she’s falling in love.
There’s only one problem. Bennet is Madelyn’s college professor, and he thinks she’s eighteen – because she hasn’t told him the truth.
The story of their forbidden romance is told in letters that Madelyn writes to Bennet – both a heart-searing ode to their ill-fated love and an apology.—via Goodreads

The Truth About You and Me is not a fun book to read.

I mean that as a compliment.

The story of this basically boils down to what would happen to Aria and Ezra (in the TV show version of PLL) in The Real World. Which is to say that it very quickly wouldn’t work out.

Told from the perspective of Maddie, a super smart sixteen-year-old who takes the majority of her classes at the local community college, The Truth About You and Me is a letter from her to Bennet, the professor she lies to and then starts a relationship with. The letter is her attempt to explain, to put him at ease, to apologize.

Through the plaintive letter, the reader can easily see how she that despite how intelligent she is, emotionally she is naive, and often manipulative. She knows she’s falling in love and she wants to relish the feeling—it’s warm and exciting and terrifyingly exhilarating. While she knows that the feeling isn’t something to be ashamed of, she also knows that the situation is completely wrong and that if they’re found out Bennet’s life will be ruined. But, because she’s sixteen and in love for the first time, she wants to be selfish.

Though you know from the beginning of the book how it will end, Amanda Grace does a great job of pacing the story and also being fair  in her depiction of Maddie. My favorite thing about this book is that Grace shows you how very immature Maddie is despite her genius-level intelligence and thoroughly enunciates the difference between thinking  and actually being mature.

Overall, The Truth About You and Me is a story of living and learning, feeling fiercely and letting it all go, and an example of what it means to emotionally mature.