Thank you Wednesday Books for the gifted book!

Read for:
Small town Texas high school
Marching band
First love
Beautiful writing

Oh gosh, Ashley’s writing is so stunning. I was hooked from page one with her debut novel, Amelia Unabridged, and felt the same way with Full Flight. I wish I could nail down what it is that I adore so much with her style, but I can’t! Just trust me and read her books!

Some maybe slight spoilers ahead....

This book was not an easy one to read. From reading other reviews and the summary itself, I knew loss was coming and it felt like I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop the whole book. I felt myself not wanting to get too attached to the characters, but I loved them so much that I couldn’t help it.

When the loss does happen, I cried a LOT. Unlike in other YA books I’ve read that involve death, this loss happens randomly and it felt like a punch to the gut. I kept thinking “WHY did this have to happen!?”, but that’s the way these terrible things can happen in real life too. Sometimes loss is just random and terrible. From the dedication and acknowledgments it seems like this book is at least loosely based on the author’s own experience of loss and it reminded me that those stories need to be told too - the ones that do just happen randomly and leave the loved ones reeling.

I do feel that the ending felt a bit too short and I never really understood why people had such an issue with Weston. I get that they thought he cut down a tree and in his small town his parents divorce was a big deal. But for the level of rumor about him I didn’t understand the why and that felt so important and it pulled me out of the story a bit.

Full Flight is a YA book that has elements of romance and a told using first person dual POV but is in fact not a romance. I feel like it is important to say that because I was lulled into a false sense of security before the author lead me down a very dark alley and broke my heart. Then she put it in a blender and lit it on fire for good measure. But seriously,

This is an amazing book full of nostalgic high school memories (real talk: high school kids can be real jerks and small towns are major rumor mills, also judge-y people exist everywhere). There was the tentative steps into first love and the tight bonds of friendship that gave this book such a hopeful feel. Weston is back at his old high school after a year away living with his dad. Their divorce fractured his family and him. Somehow he got a bad reputation and lost a lot of his spark so he didn't try to right any of those misconceptions and in fact felt very much like he didn't deserve happiness. The fact that a child is keeping that kind of heavy burden hurts my heart. Anna on the other hand is a product of love. Her family is not the richest but they have joy and love and she has a robust friend group. And yet she has what she calls shadows that lurk. The characters aren't using all the right words for these big feelings they are having and maybe some of it is just being teenagers but therapy would probably do them wonders. Instead they find each other and against all odds find love and strength. They face challenges and grow exponentially as people. I loved their journey, the growth and acceptance of the people around them and the potential for a less shadowy future.

This is my first book by this author and I did not read the blurb as carefully as I should have to see what was coming. Like I said, I was devastated and angry and honestly the author did amazing work here. She made me feel a lot.

Full Flight by Ashley Schumacher, 320 pages. Wednesday Books (St. Martin’s Press), 2022. $19.
Language: R (34 swears, 16 “f”); Mature Content: PG13; Violence: G
BUYING ADVISORY: HS - OPTIONAL
AUDIENCE APPEAL: HIGH
Victim to small-town life, Weston knows about the rumors that started to follow him after his parents’ divorce. Anna feels like Weston is her last chance to keep her part in the high school marching band and convinces him to help her. But Anna is also suffering as she struggles with the expectations the small town has for her. Connected by music and honesty, Weston and Anna hope for understanding and healing.
Reading this book is what hope tastes like. From the first page, I was engulfed by Weston’s hope; Anna’s hope soon joined it, but their hope also became mine. I felt with them. And then things started to look like they were wrapping up, but I had too much of the book left for it to really be over. Schumacher gutted me when the last conflict presented itself. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to life after closing this book. It was beautiful, and I treasure its reading. The mature content is for drug use and implied sex.
Reviewer: Carolina Herdegen

Schumacher has once again grabbed my heart! Contemporary + romance + YA is a genre I tend to stay away from. However, on a whim (beautiful cover- I’m a sucker!) I grabbed the audio to her debut last year, Amelia Unabridged (Macmillan Audio) and absolutely adored it. At 2 for 2, I will for sure read everything this woman writes.
“It was better, I thought, to be alone by yourself than to be alone surrounded by people.”
We meet Anna who is struggling through her junior year, trying to be the amazing saxophone player that she's promised she is. When assigned a duet with Weston James, she knows she needs to step it up even more. He is naturally gifted in all music but is also made out to be the guy the town has very little good to say about.
“I think the world hurts us in a lot of different ways,” he says, his words a breath along my ear. “But I also think the antidotes can be enough to make you forget there was poison in the first place.”
It was reminiscent of high school and first loves and captured the feelings I remember having so often. Both teens were broken, both were fixed for a time then life came crashing back in. I could feel the tragedy coming just around the corner and I knew it would be devastating. Schumacher's writing is almost poetic, it's is almost lyrical at times. It instantly grabs me and envelopes me in the story like very few authors can.
I highly recommend checking this one out!

A heart-wrenching story of first love and perseverance.

I really appreciate the synopsis of Full Flight for giving the reader a heads up as to where the plot's going -- without being an obvious content warning, it still gave this reader a chance to emotionally prepare herself for what was to come. (Of course, ymmv, skip it if you don't want any inklings.)

I, too, was in marching band, and played saxophone, and had my first romantic kiss with a mellophone player. I loved all the little details author Ashley Schumacher included, from learning drill to carrying around your shako. I know the "eyes... with pride" thing wasn't unique to our band, but that still hit me. I remember those big feelings all too well.

My biggest critique is that I wanted more direct support for Anna. While I liked that both characters' mental health experiences were described on the page, I wanted something more. Like... therapy? Talking with her parents about the times she feels the waves coming, threatening to pull her under?

To be sure, I thought it was really lovely, the way she and Weston saw each other for who they were, and who they could be. I also thought the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird metaphor was meaningful. I especially recommend this one to anyone who likes books that make them feel things!

“To love, he says, is to always know that it can be taken away. The pain is in the having, because you know exactly what you stand to lose.”

"It was better, I thought, to be alone by yourself than to be alone surrounded by people."

When Anna James is paired up for a marching band duet with supposed bad boy Weston Ryan, she isn't sure what to expect. Their small town is overbearing and full of rumors, but none of that stops them from quickly falling for each other.

Ashley Schumacher is a true artist. I fell in love with her writing when I read Amelia Unabridged and this time is no different. She has a beautiful way of personifying human emotion. Anxiety, loneliness, and an unquiet mind are all things that come to life in a heartbreaking and powerful way through elements of nature.

You did it again, Ashley Schumacher, you broke me with his book. She is also the only author to get me to read a book about high school band kids. Whether you're a former band kid, a musician, or simply just a reader, this book will touch your soul. It's so much more than preparing for a high school contest. It's about the need to be perfect under the gaze of your parents, first love as a child of divorce, being judged wrongfully by an entire town, community, friendship, loss.

The writing in this book is so beautiful and poetic. Everything has meaning. The music, the birds, the metaphors. I will never look at glow-in-the-dark stars the same way again. I could go on and on about this book but then I'll start crying again and you should just read it for yourself.

Thank you to Wednesday Books and Netgalley for my eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 3-3.5 Stars

I was granted eARC access to Full Flight by Ashley Schumacher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the publisher's employee who sent a widget! I absolutely adored Amelia Unabridged, so this was a welcome surprise. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

I really wish I could rate this book higher because the last 15% are full of the amazingly moving emotions and stolen innocence moments that made Amelia Unabridged so great. I feel like this might have been a completely different (and stronger) book if the first 85% had been only 15% and we got a lot more of the fallout. (I'm being vague because I don't want to spoil the plot.)

The first 85% felt far too slow and drawn out, and I think that's because I wasn't particularly connected to either POV character. If I'm being completely honest, I didn't even realize for a good 15-20% that one of the POV characters was male, and I wasn't sure whose parents were divorced and whose weren't. Anna and Weston felt like the same person in the beginning. This is probably why the insta-love didn't work for me this time, either. Again, if we could have condensed Anna and Weston before "the event" into a much smaller percentage of the story and really sat in the fallout and explored the post-event character growth, I think this would have been stronger.

Another thing that might have improved this book for me would be more from the side characters. Ratio seems like a really interesting guy but I didn't even realize he was part of the story until the last quarter. (And again, he plays such a big part of that post-event fallout story. Had the timeline been arranged differently, we would have got more of him.)

I think it's entirely possible that I just don't get a lot of the smaller parts of this plot because I'm not American and I was a never a Band Kid™. This book does seem to let that identity archetype do a lot of legwork and assumes the reader went to school in a typically American public high school. Schumacher's previous book, Amelia Unabridged, didn't. It took place outside of school months. It dropped "the event" early and followed the important characters in the fallout for most of the story. It ended on a turn toward a brighter future that felt familiar without needing to know what it's like to be an American high school student. Full Flight, on the other hand, chose to focus on the leadup to "the event," put most scenes on the high school campus, and end on a kid still in high school and only just starting to figure out how to move on from said "event."

There's a lot of attempted symbolism in this book that didn't work for me. We get Anna's thoughts on a last-of-the-species bird in the very beginning, a character catches an update on the discovery that it was not, in fact, the last of its species in the event, and I think Anna and Weston may have briefly commented on this bird to each other somewhere in the middle, but it isn't the effective symbol of grief and hope I think Schumacher intended it to be. There's also a snake in the epilogue and I briefly thought it was an afterward rather than an epilogue and Schumacher was reminiscing about a pet that might have provided some sort of inspiration to the story until the character interacting with the snake said something that made me realize the story wasn't quite over. Stars were clearly supposed to be very important to Weston and it's a big deal near the end of the book but I also didn't get that reference either. For as much as I think this book was too long and slow for where it ended and wish it followed a different timeline, I also feel like key scenes were missing that might have hung a bigger hat on those symbols.

I can see the characters we parted with at the end of Full Flight making excellent POV characters for a follow-up story, either right where this book leaves off or a short way into the future. This hasn't discouraged me from reader more of Schumacher's work in the future, but this isn't going to be the Schumacher title I tell everyone to read.

2
Thank you @wednesdaybooks @netgalley for ALC of Full Flight. Wow what a beautiful book about first love. I loved seeing Anna and Weston’s relationship develop and how it was brought to life by the narrators.

The story is so well written and I love how the story was tied in with Weston’s obsession for Kauai ‘o ‘o bird. I didn’t read the synopsis in full detail and the twist gutted my heart.

This book was not really what I expected. I wanted to fall in love with these characters, but, though they are loveable, I didn't manage it. I think the story is beautifully written but the love story never once makes sense to me. It happens too fast and for no real reason and gets overly deep very quickly. This is definitely emotional YA fiction and I'm a fan of the genre, but I think this needed a little more fleshing out. A little bit of tension or learning between the love interests at the beginning would have been appreciated.

I think Anna and Weston are great MCs. They're fun, sweet, thoughtful, "not like other teenagers" (not really, c'mon). They both have some wounds that draw them together. Anna seems to suffer from anxiety/depression though it's never confirmed. Weston has parents that are divorced and a bad reputation for legitimately no reason?? He wears a leather jacket in a small town... That's it. The cheese factor only goes up since he has deemed himself a "weirdo" along with the rest of the small town.

I enjoyed the side characters a lot. Andy and Ratio were favorites and I loved how Ratio and Anna deepened their connection as the story came to a close. Both side characters brought a lot of love and light-heartedness to the story.

I think another reason I didn't connect well with these characters is that you can tell what the "twist" is going to be from the blurb and so I was continually waiting for it to happen and couldn't get super invested.

All this said, I do think the words and emotions in this book are gorgeously done even if they were a little too much for me. I think they're perfect for the YA audience the book is intended for.

I would recommend this to people who enjoyed The Fault in Or Stars or The Last Words We Said.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my ARC!

TW/CW: death, casual mentions of religion throughout, references to mental health issues

3.5 stars

Even though reading the Goodreads synopsis basically told me the entire plot of the book, I found that there was still a lot to enjoy in Ashley Schumacher's sophomore novel Full Flight. I was absolutely captivated by her gift for prose with several excellent lines leaping out at me from the pages. I also think that she has an excellent handle on her characters, allowing them to experience emotions in the uncomfortable and overwhelming way that is so distinctly adolescent. The main relationship really shines on account of that winning combination.

What this book lacked for me was a greater picture of the world around these two characters. There is a fair amount of conflict, both internal and external, that is a result of living in Enfield, Texas amongst god-fearing but hypocritical people. Because most of these conflicts are told but not shown, I would get pulled out of the book at certain moments because I felt like I didn't have a clear picture as to why something was important. Like, did people in the town really think that Weston was going to hell just because he wore a leather jacket? This specific setting and community had such an impact on the characters' mind and hearts throughout the book and I think that fully developing that aspect of the storytelling would have made this relationship all the more rich.

Although I knew where this story would end and while there were some rocky moments for me, I must say that I still really enjoyed the journey that Schumacher took me on!

Thank you to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for an ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review!

While fall is known as football season in their small Texas town, the marching band sees it as contest season. Anna is the new saxophonist and determined to show how good she is. She's assigned a duet with troublemaker Weston, and the two gradually grow closer. When her parents find out, they try to put a stop to the relationship. The marching band contest is approaching, and then the unthinkable happens.

There's no real reason for the town to call Weston weird, other than he doesn't go with their flow, wears a leather jacket, and then has the back luck for his parents to get divorced. Everyone assumed the worst of him, and no one bothered to get past those rumors before Anna. She takes on so much stress all the time, wondering if she would deserve attention if she wasn't good enough to earn it. The two balance each other out well so that the duet they share is a good way of explaining a relationship. It's a call and answer piece, one with pauses and responses, melodies blending together to become something beautiful once each person plays their part. Goody-goody Anna lies and hides her relationship, but it's practically impossible for that plan to succeed in such a small town.

The final portion of the book, with the "unthinkable," is bittersweet. The numb response, pulling away, and grieving all feel too real, as does Anna's anger at the entire situation. Nothing is described in any kind of detail, so it hopefully won't trigger anyone. Instead, it's the reality that grief is difficult and takes time to move through. The book definitely feels like it takes place in a small town, with nosy band kids that know everything about each other gossiping and talking about each other. It's a great book, one that perhaps a lot of teens will be able to identify with.

I absolutely loved Schumacher’s debut, Amelia Unabridged, sobbing my way through that gorgeous YA romance, so I was eager to read her second book, Full Flight. This one did not disappoint! This tale of young love and marching band set in small-town Texas made my heart happy.

Weston Ryan is an outcast in Enfield, set apart by his divorced parents, his leather jacket, and his disdain for everything but music. He’s also so, so lonely.

Anna James seems to be his opposite: she has a lot of friends, a close-knit family and protective parents, and an unrelentingly sunny personality represented by the Christmas socks she wears year-round. But really, she’s lonely too.

When Anna and Weston are assigned to play a duet in the marching band’s competition show, Anna is way outmatched. So, she asks Weston to help her learn the music, a simple question that ends up drawing them together and bridging their loneliness.

Schumacher has such a brilliant touch with characters: I could feel Weston’s reluctance to take a chance at trusting someone new, afraid that he might be left behind once again. And for Anna, keeping on that cheerful, overachieving mask has covered up years of never feeling as if she’s quite good enough. Their emotions are so real and so authentic—about each other, about the role of marching band in teenagers’ lives, about the power of music—that I just loved watching both characters work through their vulnerability to come to trust the other.

I actually hope that you haven’t read the synopsis yet because I think it gives away too much. I’ll just say that this is another book by Schumacher that I didn’t want to stop reading.

This was such a great book! This book is about Anna who has to play a duet with trouble maker Weston but both fall for each other though Anna's parents are strict. This book made me cry! I barely cry for books and the ones I have cried for are Breathless and Kingdom of Ash but let me say I had some fallen tears for this one. This novel is heartbreaking but also pure and an enjoyable read. I have read the author's debut book which I absolutely loved. The plot was very well done with many conflicts but I have to say that the summary kind of spoiled some stuff for me. Even though the story was good, everything was easy to predict. The pacing and everything in that area was great. This book is also written in two povs so you will get different viewpoints and feel more emotions as you know what one is thinking. Other than that the writing was very well done.

This book is told from both Anna and Weston's pov. I enjoyed both characters a lot as they have their own struggles that need to go through. Most you can already find out through the summary but it was still nice to read the development and see what was going on. There were many side characters in the book but I have to say that they kind of played a negative role in some ways. Like how Anna's parents didn't want her to hang out with Weston but was in love with him. There were some who were positive and helped the MC but weirdly to say it was kind of nice to see how it was a typical reality novel in a sense where people can be negative towards you but you just have to make a positive outcome out of it. There is romance in this book which is an instant love/forbidden romance trope. The romance was really well done, heartbreaking and cute with a 1/5 level of steaminess.

The ending was heartbreaking and let me tell you that you will be partially destroyed so be ready with a box of tissues. I totally didn't expect this outcome of the book and was kind of shocked about it. Schumacher knows how to write contemporary books and she's nailing it with her new releases. I honestly enjoyed reading this book and was glad to receive an e-arc of it. I just wish that the summary was kind of simple because it's kind of like a movie trailer where they already reveal what is going to happen before you watch the movie. I prefer to be surprised as much as possible to get as much experience from the story as I can. Overall this was a great book and I totally recommend it to fans of Breathless and The Fault in Our Stars.

A heartbreaking, emotional story with lyrical prose, beautiful imagery, and endearing characters. The author really brings us into her characters’ emotions. By the end of the book, I had tears in my eyes. I loved the theme and symbolism of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird interwoven throughout the book which tied so well with the story. Thank you very much to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for this ARC.

In this predictable romance in a small town, football and marching band are paramount. Weston and Anna, fall in love through their dedication to music. Tragedy ensues. Wes suffers from a horrible event that appears to be his parents divorce. Anna tries to be perfect, but suffers from low self-esteem. Characters are one-dimensional.

Full Flight is...amazing. Heartbreaking. Beautiful. Devastating. It's a perfect ode to how powerful a first love is. How it makes you feel invincible and so vulnerable at the same time.

I don't usually like the boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl by page 20 thing. But Ashley Schumacher does it differently. There was a hint that the feelings have been there before we met the characters, they're just finally admitting it to themselves which made it feel real, not rushed.

The characters felt real and extremely relatable. That Anna had to keep defending what she saw in Weston was eerily like going back in time to discussions with my friends about my first love.

I highly recommend Full Flight but be sure to have a box of tissues close. I look forward to reading more books by Ashley Schumacher.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This is a charming, and at times, emotional coming-of-age story about first love.

On the surface, Anna James seems to have an ideal life. No shortage of friends, loving parents and good grades. What she is not very good at is playing the saxophone. Something she is determined to conquer for unknown reasons.
On the flip side, Weston Ryan is somewhat of an outcast at Enfield, the high school he just returned to after some trouble had him escape briefly to a rival school. In addition, his home life is less than ideal, and his grades are so bad, he risks being kicked out of the school band, the one place he excels at.
Call it fate or something like that, but the two come together when they are assigned a duet for the marching band.

Things are really slow to develop between them, but they seem to do more talking than actual practicing, which leads to a connection neither of them was looking for. There is the sweet innocence about their story and how they fall in love, that it was easy to be enamored by their story and want to cheer for them against the odds (aka Anna's strict parents). While they weren't opposites, I believe they complimented each other well. Where one was weak, the other stepped up to help.

"I hope if you write about us tonight it feels like the beginning of a very long story."
GAHHH!!!
Do they get that long story? See the synopsis.

Despite the heartbreak of this story, the author wraps up this story in a positive way to show that while the ending wasn't the perfect one, it still ends with the idea of hope.

I loved parts of this novel, but overall was left feeling disappointed. I think mostly because I was so impressed with Amelia Unabridged that I was expecting more from the author. As a band kid myself I adored all aspects of hearing about what marching band is truly like.

I loved Amelia so much and I really wanted to love this one too. I liked Anna and Weston as characters and I loved them together but everything happened so fast I didn't get a chance to feel that deep connection between them. Maybe Insta-Love just isn't my thing. I didn't really understand what made Weston such an outcast and I was ready to swoon over the bad boy but he just wasn't bad. He was lonely and sad sure, but I felt like I wanted way more insight into why he was the way he was. Obviously Ashley has a way with words and knows how to bring together characters who feel deeply but this one was a slight let down for me. I think if you're big into romance, you'll still enjoy it!

Anna and Weston are both members of their school's marching band. Anna is given the chance at a solo, but in order to keep her spot she has to train with Weston, a kid dedicated to music that the rest of the school doesn't like. Through this unlikely match-up, they find each other and find their own music in each other.

I'll admit it: this book was an absolute drag for me to finish and just left me disappointed. However, there were a few things that I liked. First, I loved the marching band setting (hence why I requested this book in the first place). I really did relate a lot to the pressures of being a saxophone player like Anna as well as a section leader. I also loved the little band unison cheers since my band in high school did something almost word for word, and it brought me back to the good old days of marching band. The pressure placed on these students was also pretty relatable for me, although I never related to the competition aspect of it since my band in high school never competed outside of normal football games.

Now let's get into everything else. I know this was meant to be a romance, but oh my god the characters were already kind of in love/had crushes on each other. Personally for me, that's the worst place to start with a romance, because you already have these characters having positive bias towards one another instead of tension. As a result, you never really see any negatives with each of these main characters since it's from both Anna and Weston's POVs. We don't really see much growth, only a growing familiarity with one another. This would have worked so much better if it was a forced proximity rivals situation.

Then there's the issue behind the plot itself. In the story, Weston is hated by his school because he supposedly had destroyed a memorial tree but no one can tie it back to him. Ever since then, the school saw him as "weird" and a kid not to be associated with. It was so bad that Weston moved schools but then moved back for his senior year. That's it. That's the only reason that they hate Weston. It's probably the dumbest reason I've ever read in a story for people to hate someone. Yes, I get the memorial tree is important, but if they can't tie it back to him, it's pretty useless of a reason. To be honest, I almost burst out laughing when I read this part.

Another addition to my struggle with the plot is actually the parents. They feel like they play some kind of seesaw role, where they rock to extremes at one point and then another complete opposite on the other. Minor spoilers so if you want to avoid them, skip ahead.

Basically Anna's parents find out she's been out late and lying to them in order to hang out with Weston and they ground her, which is fair and I will admit that Anna kind of acted like a brat. But then it takes one (1) interaction with Weston for her parents to be like "Okay we absolutely love him despite the rumors about him and see nothing wrong with him." It was so quick of a shift it gave me whiplash. To be fair, they still were reprimanding Anna, but parents don't change opinions that quickly. I know that too well.

Okay spoiler over. Because of all of the above reasons, it made this book absolutely awful for me to read pacing wise. I wanted to DNF the book since 20% in but I pulled through. I will give Full Flight credit for some good continuing symbolism and themes, as well as the marching band, but everything else about this book fell flat for me. I know I usually get emotional at endings like what this book had, but I didn't shed a single tear.

If you liked The Bridge of Terabithia with a more heavy dosage of romance, this book will be for you. Otherwise, it just wasn't for me.