Golden by Jessi Kirby

Title: Golden
Author: Jessi Kirby
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Release date: May 14th 2013

Rating: 5 / 5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

Seventeen-year-old Parker Frost has never taken the road less traveled. Valedictorian and quintessential good girl, she’s about to graduate high school without ever having kissed her crush or broken the rules. So when fate drops a clue in her lap—one that might be the key to unraveling a town mystery—she decides to take a chance.

Julianna Farnetti and Shane Cruz are remembered as the golden couple of Summit Lakes High—perfect in every way, meant to be together forever. But Julianna’s journal tells a different story—one of doubts about Shane and a forbidden romance with an older, artistic guy. These are the secrets that were swept away with her the night that Shane’s jeep plunged into an icy river, leaving behind a grieving town and no bodies to bury.

Reading Julianna’s journal gives Parker the courage to start to really live—and it also gives her reasons to question what really happened the night of the accident. Armed with clues from the past, Parker enlists the help of her best friend, Kat, and Trevor, her longtime crush, to track down some leads. The mystery ends up taking Parker places that she never could have imagined. And she soon finds that taking the road less traveled makes all the difference.

This is the first book I´ve read of Jessi Kirby, but after reading Golden I will definitely going to check her other books. Golden is a book that I LOVED! this is a very, very, very good book.

Parker Frost is a 17 year old who has always followed the rules, has excellent grades, was accepted into  the college of her choice and is a finalist for Cruz-Farnetti scholarship, which will cover the cost of the four years of college. So when one of her teachers asked her to help him to send the journals that been storage for the last 10 years to their owners and within these she finds Julianna´s Farnetti journal, a girl that died 10 years ago with her boyfriend Shane. At first she doesn´t know what to do with it ...... she thinks like everyone in her town that Shane and Julianna were the golden couple, that had everything and were deeply in love... so what do she do with it....send it to her parents or take it the place of the accident or read it thus know a little more about Julianna and her romance with Shane.

I must say that Parker is a romantic, she loves to read romance novels and movies which is what ultimately decides her to read the journal and ends up discovering a story that she wasn´t expecting, that the gold and perfect romance between Julianna and Shane wasn´t perfect and also discovers that Julianna met someone else before she died.

At the beginning of the journal is a quote "Tell me what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?", this quote is what comes to influence Julianna´s life and in turn Parker´s life, because she begins to question her life and decisions so far and where her life is headed.

From the moment that Parker starts reading the journal, the plot hook me and sometimes I wanted to stay in the past with Julianna and know that more about her and the mysterious guy, but it was necessary to return to the present to see Parker beginning to follow Julianna´s steps and discovered new things about her and how it was affecting her life.

Overall, Golden is a coming of age story with a great romance (mainly Julianna´s), friendship, mystery (love it) and we get to see the protagonist as she begins to take risks because Parker prefers to not take them for fear of failure, so she takes the safe way but there are a lot of thing that she hasn´t done yet. I really loved Golden, is one of my favorite book of this year and I recommend it to fans of contemporary romance novels.

Favorites quotes

"Sorry to break it to you, P, but actual guys don´t talk like the ones in Nicholas Sparks books."

“Sometimes a shock to the system is a good thing, you know? Like a reminder that you're alive.”

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost