Call It What You Want

Description: When his dad is caught embezzling funds from half the town, Rob goes from popular lacrosse player to social pariah. Even worse, his father's failed suicide attempt leaves Rob and his mother responsible for his care.
      Everyone thinks of Maegan as a typical overachiever, but she has a secret of her own after the pressure got to her last year. And when her sister comes home from college pregnant, keeping it from her parents might be more than she can handle.
    When Rob and Maegan are paired together for a calculus project, they're both reluctant to let anyone through the walls they've built. But when Maegan learns of Rob's plan to fix the damage caused by his father, it could ruin more than their fragile new friendship .

Review: Family dynamics is the front and center of Brigid Kemmerer's Call It What You Want. The story is told from dual perspectives, Rob and Maegan, who are grappling with serious and complicated issues. Rob is a former popular student whose father sustained a profound brain injury after a failed suicide attempt after he was turned in for embezzling his investors’ money. Rob now carries the burden to take care for his father. He is also wracked by guilt and constantly reminded that his father’s clients, many of whom are his peers’ families, lost everything. Many people in his community suspect that Rob knew of his father's actions since he interned at his father's company, but Rob adamantly claims he is innocent. Suspicion tracks Rob everywhere and makes him a social pariah until an unsuspected olive branch is presented in the form of a math project.
  Maegan is the dutiful and caring daughter of a police officer who struggles in the shadow of her lacrosse-star older sister, who is now home from college unexpectedly pregnant. Maegan is dealing with the fallout of last year when she is caught cheating on the SAT a year earlier, causing the scores of everyone in the room to be invalidated. Like Rob, Maegan is also working through her own guilt and never feeling good enough.
  Kemmerer's has a a knack for creating flawed characters who are complex and real. Rob and Maegan both live in the gray moral boundaries and are trying to remove the taint of their reputation, whether it is by their own action or the actions of others. Both characters are wrestling with questions about ethical responsibility and grief. The romance between Rob and Maegan is a slow burn one where they  slowly become confidants and chip away at one another’s defenses—and their burgeoning attraction causes fallout of its own. There is a lot tackled in this romantic realistic fiction novel that could weigh it down, but the story is well-grounded with funny dialogue. There is also a natural discussion of race and privilege in the book, which I appreciated. This is another winner from Brigid Kemmerer.

Rating: 4 stars

Words of Caution: There is some strong language, scenes of underage drinking, and references to an attempted suicide.

If you like this book try: Just Listen by Sarah Dessen, Dear Evan Hansen by Val Emmich, Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson