Forever Obsession: Review: Sidelined

Sidelined by Kendra C. Highley

ISBN: 9781622662975
Pages: 250
Source: Entangled Teen

Publication Date: October 1, 2013

Initial Reaction:

Genna Pierce’s life is finally falling into place. Perfect grades? Check. Her choice of scholarship now that basketball recruiters are sniffing around? Check. The hot guy she’s crushed on since freshman year finally noticing her? Looks like it’ll be a check any day now.

But when a freak accident sidelines Genna, her perfect life starts breaking apart into a million less-than-perfect pieces. No more scholarships. Spiraling grades. And she’s sure Jake Butler, her forever crush, will have zero interest in someone as broken as she is.

Except Jake does want to stick around. He may have started falling for the girl Genna used to be, but he’ll wait for the girl she could become—if she can find enough left in her to pick up the pieces and start again.

Hello everyone! So today I have my review for Sidelined by Kendra C. Highley which is a heartwarming YA contemporary about second chances.

Sidelined follows Genna Pierce, basketball star and straight A student. Her life seems to be coming together after all the years of hard work with college basketball in her future and Jake Butler finally noticing her existence. Everything comes crashing down when she shatters her leg at a semi-champion game and college basketball is no longer in her grasp. Without basketball, Genna has no idea who she is and the search to find her identity apart for basketball proves to be more difficult than she expected.

When I first read the synopsis, I was expecting a relatively simple but heartwarming story about a girl trying to put her life together after an accident and it is that to some extent. Sidelined surprised me. It deals with more than just the physical recovery post-accident but delves deep into the long and winding path of emotional recovery. We are able to follow Genna as she navigates through her journey and the more downs she experienced, the more I was rooting for her to overcome every obstacle.

While Genna is the main character, every single person in her life is important from her parents to her best friend Rowan, to her boyfriend Jake and even her nemesis Ethan. Each supporting character plays such an important role in her recovery and she learns to appreciate them more for what they are doing and have done. I was really surprised by her relationship with Ethan and I have to say that they definitely define the phrase of "turning a new leaf" and bonding together through shared hardships.

I mentioned the deep emotional recovery that Genna goes through and part of that is attributed to her addiction to Vicodin. Honestly, addiction was not something I expected to be discussed in this novel, but I loved how it was delivered. The raw struggle that she had to go through with rehab treatments and her shrink meetings were painful but so incredibly important and it added so much to the overall story.

This novel touches on all the important obstacles of recovery and portrays the struggle in such a real manner that it's difficult to not ponder on it after you finish reading. While I personally am not super sporty, I can see this really touching a lot of people who have experienced Genna's struggle.

*I received a copy from Entangled Teen for review. All opinions are 100% my own.*