I'll Meet You There Review

I’ll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios

Title: I’ll Meet You There

Author: Heather Demetrios

Series: None

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.

Publication Date: February 3, 2015

Genre: Fiction; Realistic Fiction; Contemporary; Romance; Young Adult

Pages: 388

Format: Hardcover

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If seventeen-year-old Skylar Evans were a typical Creek View girl, her future would involve a double-wide trailer, a baby on her hip, and the graveyard shift at Taco Bell. But after graduation, the only thing standing between straightedge Skylar and art school are three minimum-wage months of summer. Skylar can taste the freedom—that is, until her mother loses her job and everything starts coming apart. Torn between her dreams and the people she loves, Skylar realizes everything she’s ever worked for is on the line.

Nineteen-year-old Josh Mitchell had a different ticket out of Creek View: the Marines. But after his leg is blown off in Afghanistan, he returns home, a shell of the cocksure boy he used to be. What brings Skylar and Josh together is working at the Paradise—a quirky motel off California’s dusty Highway 99. Despite their differences, their shared isolation turns into an unexpected friendship and soon, something deeper.

On some level, I always knew this book was going to be good. My book compass is rarely this right. To my delight, I’ll Meet You There started out good and kept getting better from there.

Skylar Evans is trapped in her rusty nowhere town of Creek View. If she followed the unspoken rules of all other Creek View residents, she’d stay there for the rest of her life, living pay check-to-paycheck on a GED education or less. She’d marry a good-for-nothing furniture occupier and be pregnant by the time she was getting her high school diploma. And she’d be happy about it. But passionately artistic Skylar sticks to her own Plan. But when art school and the escape from her dead beat town starts slipping through her outstretched fingers, she starts to think the Plan is just another dream. Then, Josh Mitchell, town legend turned Marine, returns from Afghanistan with only one leg. Skylar and Josh’s path coincidentally collide at Paradise, and years of loneliness and hopeless dreaming come together and form a relationship deeper in meaning than either of them had ever hoped they deserved.

This book is about a lot of things: overcoming socioeconomic status, the tragic aftermath of fighting in a war, loss, betrayal, hope, and love. It was a statement of the intricate traps set by a person’s external environment, and the trying attempts one has to make in order to break free of such prisons.

Skylar Evans has always been subject to the life of trailer parks and working two jobs to support a static life that becomes neither better nor worse. Success and comfortability is unforeseeable from her and her family’s impoverished position. Her mother, throughout the story, is vulnerable to bouts of depression and the draw of a man whose only attractive feature is his ability to finance her and Skylar’s lives.

Josh’s reckless reputation has kept his old self alive in his old home town of Creek View. His return after joining the Marines was unexpected yet quickly accepted. After all, a life in Creek View was like quicksand; you could try to escape and may even almost succeed for a moment, but sooner or later, you’re bound to be sucked back in again. Josh not only returns as a shell of the charismatic and rash boy he once was but also as a wounded veteran with the bags upon bags of suppressed learned instincts and emotions.

What’s so different about this book compared to all the other tributes to our veterans is Demetrios’ unapologetic take on the wounded veteran. Held in such high esteem, it’s not uncommon for authors to tip-toe around their characters, afraid to break their perfect warrior specimen, to flaw them in places they should be polished. Demetrios, exposed to the life of veterans and soldiers her entire life, was fearless yet respectful with her imperfect portrayal of Josh, the image of a war vet riddled with guilt, regret, fear, and post-traumatic stress. Not only was she brutally honest with the way she built Josh so ragged and bruised, but also with the means in which she formed the harsh realities of loving someone such as Josh.

Neither Josh nor Skylar can be considered unique or original. As mere representations of the millions of people living in their positions, their main purpose is to instill a special kind of compassion and respect for those they embody. Demetrios’ mastery in storytelling was hypnotic and hard to look away from, as was all the elements in her story. From the characters to the setting to the heartbreak, this novel was breathtakingly real.