Break the Spell

by A.M. Bostwick

Alone. On the run. Until she came along.


When Allison Evans walks out of high school the last day of her senior year, she has no idea that her carefully guarded life is about to unravel.


Ethan Knight is on the run. Accused of dealing drugs and armed with nothing but a bad reputation and his motorcycle, he takes refuge for the weekend inside the old high school. Thinking no one will find him and no one does.


Until Allison. Panicked and left with no other choice, Ethan takes her captive. It should be a nightmare, but together, both of their lives take an unexpected turn. It’s time for them both to stop running from their problems.

253 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2015

About the author

A.M. Bostwick writes Middle Grade and Young Adult novels. Her debut middle grade novel, The Great Cat Nap, earned the 2014 Tofte/Wright Children's Literature Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. It also earned the Moonbeam Children's Award Bronze Medal in the Pre-Teen Fiction category. The sequel and standalone, The Clawed Monet, hit the shelves in 2016. Her young adult novel, Break the Spell, released in autumn 2015. An early draft of that book was a finalist in the 2013 Wisconsin Romance Writers of America Fab 5 Contest. She has placed in Rochester Writers' contests in 2014 and 2016 and has had short fiction appear in Black Fox Literary. 

Reviews

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm the literary agent for this book, and I love how Ethan’s dark, explosive attitude clashes with Allison’s cool wall of sarcasm. It's a fun read and an awkward teen romance that will have you grinning, even though both Ethan and Allison feel like they have much more important things to deal with -- like a warrant for Ethan's arrest and Allison's scary diagnosis.

[Elizabeth Felt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is beautiful, and the characters are really well drawn. Two high school seniors, on the verge of graduation, spend time accidentally hiding out together. They both have serious problems: Ethan is wanted by police in connection to a recent drug bust; Allison has some sort of serious medical problem that she has kept secret from everyone in her life. We readers aren't sure what the truth is about either of them, and as the two learn about each other, and begin to care about each other, so do we. A young adult book that adult readers will enjoy too.

[etoile1996 · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my favorite literary tropes is the basis of this young adult novel--forced to spend a weekend together away from the outside world, Ethan and Allison break down the barriers that they had been keeping up to avoid their problems and protect their secrets. Learning about each other's true characters, they find love and are able to comfort each other and offer each other hope for the future.

I especially loved Ethan. Allison was a little harder to love, she's almost too prickly. And the news reporter angle didn't really ring true to me, nor did I think it was necessary. There could have been less complicated ways to contrive their being together at the school on off hours.

It's a quick read, I finished it in a couple of hours. There are some really great lines, but I wish the editing had been tighter. A few too many random periods and typos kept tripping me up.

Also, maybe it's just me! but her possible MS diagnosis storyline needed some fine tuning I think. But maybe it's because my Dad has MS and it's not as devastating as Allison makes it out to be, though I know it can be devastating, so that's probably not a fair sentiment on my part. But then I also just don't understand her secretiveness, and maybe that's because I was diagnosed with type I diabetes in high school, which some people also consider to be devastating, and I wasn't such a drama llama about the whole thing. Like on the one hand Allison is dealing with her disease, she's taking care of herself. I just don't buy that she would have managed to keep the whole thing such a secret from everyone. But just because that didn't really work for me doesn't mean it won't work for everybody.

Oh, and one last comment... The title and the cover, are not great. I kept thinking this was going to be a paranormal, about witches or something. But it's a contemporary YA.