Perfect Escape ~ Jennifer Brown (eARC) review

Perfect Escape
Little, Brown Young Readers
July 10, 2012
368 pages
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Kendra has grown up living in the shadow of her older brother, Grayson's shadow. Living with severe OCD, Grayson - and Kendra along with the parents - has had to live a carefully regimented life for almost as long as Kendra can remember.

The only way Kendra's found not to be eclipsed totally by Grayson is to be perfect. While taxing, it's seemed to work . . . until now. A school scandal is about to bring her perfectness to end.

Not ready to face her parents or their disappointment, Kendra thinks if she can just get far enough away, she'll know how to handle it. But first she's got to get Grayson. Maybe some distance can help him, too.

At some point, she'll have to stop running, stop trying to fix things by escaping and face her problems. Her problems from school, her problems with Grayson and their relationship - the problems his OCD has caused in her life . . . and the why she's always tried so hard to be perfect. And what she'll do now, that she's failed.


Perfect Escape is less a road trip novel - though it's that a bit - and much more about Grayson and Kendra's relationship. The difficulties of living with an (older) brother and son with an illness for Kendra and her parents, respectively, has shaped their lives. They don't go on vacations, they do - or don't do - things certain ways.

While Kendra loves her brother, she's getting kind of sick of it.

A road trip is definitely not how their mother would go about things, but that's the point for Kendra. She wants to do something different, even if she's not quite sure what it is.

I love that with Perfect Escape so much of a point is made about what's not quite right with Grayson, we see during the novel all of the problems that Kendra, in fact, has. Even as she's been trying to be perfect.

There's also quite a great, in all its flaws, sibling relationship. Readers are just left waiting for the two of them to either explode of slowly talk things out - it's clear something has to happen, though.

The secondary characters that are introduced - one in particular - are great. I really hoped that the one character would stick around because she had a lot of depth and might have even been my favorite character of the novel in general.

Rating: 7/10

thank you to LBYR and NetGalley for my egalley of this novel!