Ask Me How I Got Here by Christine Heppermann
Published by Greenwillow on May 3rd 2016
Genres: Contemporary
Pages: 240
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
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Addie has always known what she was running toward. In cross-country, in life, in love. Until she and her boyfriend—her sensitive, good-guy boyfriend—are careless one night and she ends up pregnant. Addie makes the difficult choice to have an abortion. And after that—even though she knows it was the right decision for her—nothing is the same anymore. She doesn’t want anyone besides her parents and her boyfriend to know what happened; she doesn’t want to run cross-country; she can’t bring herself to be excited about anything. Until she reconnects with Juliana, a former teammate who’s going through her own dark places.

Ask Me How I Got Here ended up on my TBR because I needed a quick book to read.  I’m not typically a fan of books written in verse and I think that’s probably why I didn’t love this one.  It had potential to be more than it was though it was by no means, bad.

Pros:

• Story: The story was fast and extremely interesting.  Addie is a teenage girl attending an all girls Catholic school when she gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion.  However, to get an abortion in her state, she has to have parental consent.  So not only do she and her boyfriend know, so do her parents.  The abortion causes Addie to lose a lot of motivation for things such as cross-country and she starts to become withdrawn.  Her relationships suffer and it takes a lot of introspection for her to really get past what she has done.

• Verse: While I did mention that verse novels aren’t really for me, I think it fit well with this story.  Writing in verse really opens up a lot of different possibilities for the author and Christine Heppermann took advantage of that.  Not only was Addie’s story told in what she had to say but also in what she didn’t say or even what she crossed out.

Cons:

• Characters: I never felt like I knew or could connect with any of the characters.  I understood that Addie was going through a very tough time but I couldn’t feel that much for her.  She shut herself off from the people that were there for her and she wasn’t willing to let any of them try to help her.  As for Nick or Addie’s parents or even Claire, they all played very brief roles and so I didn’t really get a feel for any of them.

• Romance: The romance between Addie and Nick was cute but not very substantial.  The romance between Addie and Julianna seemed to come out of nowhere and didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  I think Addie saw some of herself in what Julianna went through and so she was drawn to her.  Don’t get me wrong, I liked Julianna just fine but I didn’t really see a connection between her and Addie.  Once again, probably a little due to the writing style.

Overall, Ask Me How I Got Here was not one for me but I can see why it’s been getting quite a bit of love from some other bloggers.  The poetry was great and the story was definitely something that appealed to me but it just fell flat in some areas.