Review Detail

This is an intense story about one young man's search to find the best path in life after a series of heartbreaking losses leave him struggling to differentiate the thin line between friendship and love and learning how to forgive himself.

Jason Prosper, a snarky eighteen year old whose grown up in a world befitting of his last name, has a love and natural talent for sailing. He's good looking enough and he's never lacked for anything whether it be girls, friends or material things but none of those have ever mattered much to Jason. He's always felt at home, sailing the seas with his childhood friend and crew partner, Cal, but when Cal commits suicide during their junior year at Kensington Prep, Jason is devastated.

Jason can't imagine life without Cal; they were as close as brothers, people often mistaking them for such. He spends the remainder of his school year and summer splitting his time between his homes in Maine and Manhattan, tormenting himself with memories of Cal. As the school year starts, Jason finds himself beginning his senior year on the island for misfit toys, otherwise known as Bellingham Academy, a third rate boarding school for rich kids.

At Bellingham, he runs into old acquaintances but it's here that he also meets Aidan, the girl with the boy's name and the fiery red hair. Aidan not only has a tortured past of her own, but she might be exactly what Jason needs in order to find his own starboard sea.

Together they begin an emotional and touching journey of shared secrets of the past and talk of forging a new future, one of hope and healing. Then a hurricane sweeps the New England coast leaving even more destruction in Jason's young life and uncovering a heart wrenching secret in the process.

By the time graduation rolls around, Jason will have earned his education but it will have little to do with academics and more to do with learning who his real friends are, what it means to be free of oneself and who it is he really wants to be.

Jason, Cal and Aidan are all the kind of characters you just want to hug. Forever. My heart ached for all three of them more than any of the other characters and I felt like if they'd each been loved properly as kids growing up, maybe they wouldn't have been so screwed up. They each seemed to pursue people and things who represented what they were looking for in their parents but didn't get. A void to fill. Some people do that with money, some use drugs, alcohol or sex. I would've loved to bring all home with me and just loved on them.

What's with boarding schools anyway? It seems like another way for rich parents to not have to deal with their kids to me which is just sad. Nannies first and then boarding schools. It's as if the children are just another accessory, another acquisition.