The Selective Collective: Nobody But Us

Welcome to The Selective Collective. Together with our friends at The Book Addict’s Guide, Gone Pecan, The Grown Up YA and Teen Lit Rocks, we’ll be exploring a new release in its entirety, from review to author spotlight, to a roundtable chat, among other fun things.

This week we’re discussing Nobody But Us by debut author Kristin Halbrook.

Will

Maybe I’m too late. Maybe Zoe’s dad stole all her fifteen years and taught her to be scared. I’ll undo it. Help her learn to be strong again, and brave. Not that I’m any kind of example, but we can learn together.

When the whole world is after you, sometimes it seems like you can’t run fast enough.

Zoe

Maybe it’ll take Will years to come to terms with being abandoned. Maybe it’ll take forever. I’ll stay with him no matter how long it takes to prove that people don’t always leave, don’t always give up on you. (Amazon)

This week I get the pleasure of doing our Casting Call. This book is told from the perspectives of both Will and Zoe, so we get quite a clear picture of each of them and how their minds work.  Zoe is a girl being raised by a violent, alcoholic father.  She’s bright and works hard and she’s all sweet innocence.  She tries to hide the bruises on her face and spends most of her time walking on eggshells, afraid to set off her dad.  Will is that bad boy, bad because he struggles with his own anger issues. Bad, not because it’s in any way his fault he’s been shuffled from foster home to foster home and abused along the way, bad because that’s how most everyone sees him.  He wants nothing more than to protect Zoe, but that need in him is so primal that sometimes it gets out of hand.

For Zoe, I checked in with my Selective Collective partners and Candice had the best suggestion: Dakota Fanning.  I have a tendency to picture her like this:

But actually, she’s quite grown up.

I think she still maintains that girlish sweetness that I imagine Zoe to have.

For Will, to me it was a no brainer.

Shiloh Fernandez just screams bad boy. He could be a really nice boy. He could be a choir boy for all I know, but he looks like trouble.  Like the kind of boy you would not want your daughter to date. Yeah, it was tough digging through all those photos, let me tell you. Ahem.

Please be sure to visit my blogging partners in The Selective Collective and check out the great things they have in store:

The Book Addict’s Guide- Roundtable Discussion

Gone Pecan-Trippin in YA

The Grown Up YA- Author Spotlight

Teen Lit Rocks- Review

Special thanks to Harper Teen for providing review copies of Nobody But Us! It’s on sale now.