Autumn by Sierra Dean

Dog Days, Book 1

Synopsis: Cooper Reynolds’s life is going to the dogs… literally. As if being a high school senior in a small Texas town wasn’t hard enough, Cooper has bigger things to worry about than who he’ll take to prom and whether or not the Poisonfoot Padres will win homecoming. He has less than a year before his eighteenth birthday, when a curse placed on his family will doom him to live in coyote form forever. The last thing he needs to complicate his already messed-up life is a girl, but fate has other plans in mind for him when it brings Eloise “Lou” Whittaker to Poisonfoot. She’s grouchy, sarcastic and has no love for her new Texas home, but she might be exactly the right person to help Cooper break the curse. The clock is ticking, and Cooper will have to decide if he’s willing to let Lou in on his dirty little secret before it’s too late

Review: I really love the Secret McQueen series by Sierra Dean, so when she announced her first young adult novel, I was more than intrigued. With a style quite different, the author manages here to take us into her world and make us discover her characters.

Lou is a girl like any other, or at least that’s what she thought until the death of her father. Left with nothing, mother and daughter must travel to their hometowns to start a new life with their grandmother. But this city is full of secrets and Lou herself seems to be the heart of all that. And while everyone forbids her to hang on with a boy at her school, our young heroine seems strangely attracted to him and refuses to be dictated on her choices. But this association seems to disturb more than one person and each is trying to understand why. A story far from what they thought where everyone knows what is going on but is hiding all the information.

I admit that I was intrigued by what the people of this city were hiding. We try to understand what is happening and I must say that at the end of the novel, even if we have some information, we still have a lot to discover. The curse cast is intriguing and I confess that I have a lot of questions about it and I hope will be answered in the second volume.

Lou is a studious young girl, but also determined to be friends with the people she wants, and although the city is against him, Cooper is the boy with whom she wants to stay. I admit that I struggled to understand why everyone wanted to separate them but I found they formed a cute little couple. This boy immediately broke our heart at the beginning of the story. Very isolated, he has only his sister and his mother to confide and no friend to stay with him when he needs it. So when Lou shows him some interest, hope born in him, so he could finally have a friend and maybe a little more. But there are not the only characters and I have a lot of trouble to decide what to think about Archer. We can not really like him after all his actions but it is true that it is difficult to determine his motives and I look forward to learn more about him.

The end of the novel is quite surprising and I confess that I did not expect that. I’m curious to see what will happen now and where it will lead our heroine. I’ll wait patiently for the release of the next novel for it.