Autumn's Kiss

Reviewed by: Brooke Faulkner - McArthur Public Library, Biddeford, Southern Maine Library District

Review Date: December 7, 2015

Review

Cuban-American Autumn returns for this second in the "Autumn Falls" series that began when her beloved father died in a car accident and Autumn and her younger brother and mom went ahead with a planned move to Florida, where they are closer to Autumn's grandmother. In the first, Autumn discovered a magical diary that seemed to make her wishes actually occur, albeit not in ways she always would have expected. As this installment opens, she's perplexed and sad to find that the diary no longer seems to work particularly because her grandmother had suggested that her father's spirit was behind the magic. Conveniently, she then discovers a map that instantly transports her to any location she writes on it, and she uses it primarily to help her friends and her own romantic prospects come together. Teen author Thorne is an actress, and this novel very much reads like a romance situational comedy. Younger teen romance fans will enjoy her run-ins with a fictional teen heart-throb and will thrill to the love triangle predicament Autumn finds herself in here. The map gimmick assists in moving the plot along and often results in funny mishaps which are sometimes exacerbated by Autumn's dyslexia, but its mechanisms are vaguely explained only as being attributable to the Caribbean Taino people. Autumn's grandmother and her tight-knit group of friends are real characters and provide plenty of levity but an ongoing joke about a friend who starts a petition to change the school's football team from the name "Indians" only to abandon it when she's informed the activism won't look as good on a college application as she'd hoped simply isn't funny. Readers will want to have read the first in the series before picking this one up.

Overall Book Score: fair