You Before Anyone Else by Julie Cross & Mark Perini:ARC Book Review #ARCAugust

Title: You Before Anyone Else
Author: Mark Perini & Julie Cross
Publisher: SourceBooks Fire
Published Date: August 2nd 2016
Genre: Contemporary, YA
Page Count: 400
Format: Kindle

My Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

Goodreads Summary: 
Model Finley needs someone to help her shed her "good girl" persona, so she'll try Eddie on for size.

New York City model Finley is fed up with hearing the same feedback at castings: she needs to take some serious action to wipe the "good girl" stamp from her resume if she wants to launch to stardom.

Enter Eddie Wells. He's shallow, predictable…and just as lost as Finley feels. Deep down, Finley is drawn to Eddie's bravado, his intensity. Except Eddie is hiding something. A big something. And when it surfaces, both loving and leaving Finley will become so much harder.

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 My Review:

"And even though today sucked, it was nice to be good at something. To feel like I belonged, even if my consultant position as made up on the spot."

When I first started reading this book, I wasn’t really enjoy it, but as time went on and we actually got to know the characters outside of what they were both pretending to be I started liking it and them together.

First we have Finley who is a young model who has been labeled as sweet and innocent and because of that barely get any jobs.

Then we have Eddie who has the whole bad boy image somehow placed on him without anyone knowing him.

We also get to know Finley’s friends and family as time goes on and they are all rather important characters we hardly get to know Eddie’s though until the last 30 percent of the book I would say.

Now I really can’t say too much about Eddie’s life without giving things away, but he really is a complicated character and he has so many different things going for him even though so many people are working against him. Finley is more easy to talk about because her storyline isn’t as big of one nor is it dealing with as big of a thing as Eddie is. Finley is trying to get enough money saved up to open her dream business that she’s always wanted to do since she was little, but she’s not exactly sure how to make it happen. But with Eddie’s help and encouragement she finally gets it right and they are both able to work things out for the better, and as much as I didn’t like them together at first by the end of the story I was rooting for them and I really hope they are able to make it.

"Here, the goal is to have fun and maybe even be the most fun person. I have trouble with that now. Having fun."

This story is told in two perspective and is told so each chapter when we switch. I’ve really grown to like reading these types of books because we get to see things from how both people might think of them and we get to see them grow together so much quicker than if we were just seeing things from one person’s perspective.  Overall I did enjoy this story, I did have a few problems with it but I was expecting them because of what both Eddie and Finley did for money and how that industry is. This does talk about drug use and uses swear words and intimate relationships as teenagers. It was all handled rather well though and they both learned and grew from these things. 

"There are literally a hundred ways to do everything. No one ever talks about that- it's always about finding the one best way- but there are hundreds of ways to do shit."

Thank you to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Fire for an e-ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.