Review: Slingshot by Mercedes Helnwein

Slingshot by Mercedes Helnwein

Blurb from Goodreads:

Grace Welles had resigned herself to the particular loneliness of being fifteen and stuck at a third-tier boarding school in the swamps of Florida, when she accidentally saves the new kid in her class from being beat up. With a single aim of a slingshot, the monotonous mathematics of her life are obliterated forever…because now there is this boy she never asked for. Wade Scholfield.

With Wade, Grace discovers a new way to exist. School rules are optional, life is bizarrely perfect, and conversations about wormholes can lead to make-out sessions that disrupt any logical stream of thoughts.

So why does Grace crush Wade’s heart into a million tiny pieces? And what are her options when she finally realizes that 1. The universe doesn’t revolve around her, and 2. Wade has been hiding a dark secret. Is Grace the only person unhinged enough to save him?

Acidly funny and compulsively readable, Mercedes Helnwein’s debut novel Slingshot is a story about two people finding each other and then screwing it all up. See also: soulmate, friendship, stupidity, sex, bad poetry, and all the indignities of being in love for the first time. 

My Review:
This book is so good and wasn't exactly what I was expecting.  I immediately loved Gracie and found her internal dialogue to be so refreshing.  Once she started interacting with other students at her boarding school, the book really took off and I couldn't put it down.  I love the boarding school setting but this one was particularly unique and had its own world and voice. I definitely recommend this to fans of Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld; I recently re-read that book and not only does it hold up but Slingshot feels like a modern Prep to me.

Slingshot comes out next week on April 27, 2021, and you can purchase HERE!  I definitely recommend this one!

He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me over so that my head ended up in his neck and I could smell his skin, which smelled nothing like a girl's skin. He just held me like that without saying anything else. It nearly killed me, because it was the cleanest form of affection I had ever felt from someone other than my mother.  It wasn't a "move." It was just a gesture. It was one of those sudden ways in which he was beyond his years.