The You I've Never Known by Ellen Hopkins

How do you live your life if your past is based on a lie? A new novel in both verse and prose from #1 New York Times bestselling author, Ellen Hopkins.

For as long as she can remember, it’s been just Ariel and Dad. Ariel’s mom disappeared when she was a baby. Dad says home is wherever the two of them are, but Ariel is now seventeen and after years of new apartments, new schools, and new faces, all she wants is to put down some roots. Complicating things are Monica and Gabe, both of whom have stirred a different kind of desire.

Maya’s a teenager who’s run from an abusive mother right into the arms of an older man she thinks she can trust. But now she’s isolated with a baby on the way, and life’s getting more complicated than Maya ever could have imagined.

Ariel and Maya’s lives collide unexpectedly when Ariel’s mother shows up out of the blue with wild accusations: Ariel wasn’t abandoned. Her father kidnapped her fourteen years ago.

What is Ariel supposed to believe? Is it possible Dad’s woven her entire history into a tapestry of lies? How can she choose between the mother she’s been taught to mistrust and the father who has taken care of her all these years?

In bestselling author Ellen Hopkins’s deft hands, Ariel’s emotionally charged journey to find out the truth of who she really is balances beautifully with Maya’s story of loss and redemption. This is a memorable portrait of two young women trying to make sense of their lives and coming face to face with themselves—for both the last and the very first time. @goodreads

MY REVIEW:

3 STARS 

I love Ellen Hopkins and her books but this one was just okay to me. It's still written in her beautiful verse that I love but I felt like it was too long. <---Yes, her books are long but there were things I didn't really care to read about and it went on and on before things started to fall into place.

I did love most of the characters and I felt so bad for Ariel, the way her dad treated her. I mean here she is at seventeen still begging him to let her get her driver's license and he doesn't want her getting a job. It's like she has to be stuck to his hip.

Ariel does have some friends and this is the one city they have stayed in the longest as they have moved all of her life. Just on and on. . .

But now Ariel has friends and love interests and she wants to stay and be a teen!

Maya's story isn't as much in the book as Ariel's but it tells about how she ends up getting pregnant and thinks this is the best thing to get away from her mom. She marries a military man and they travel where ever he is stationed. She has a beautiful baby girl but things are never what they seem.



I love when we are almost at the end of the book and all of the pieces fit together. I already knew what was coming, I figured it out about halfway through. But I also loved that Ariel got to become the person she was hoping for in certain ways. She also made more wonderful friends. 

GOODREADS REVIEW:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1893104653