REVIEW: You Are My Only by Beth Kephart

You Are my Only by Beth Kephart
Published: October 25th, 2011 by Egmont USA
Acquired: For Review.
Format:ARC Paperback, 240 pages
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary

Rating:½
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Emmy Rane is married at nineteen, a mother by twenty. Trapped in a life with a husband she no longer loves, Baby is her only joy. Then one sunny day in September, Emmy takes a few fateful steps away from her baby and returns to find her missing. All that is left behind is a yellow sock.

Fourteen years later, Sophie, a homeschooled, reclusive teenage girl is forced to move frequently and abruptly from place to place, perpetually running from what her mother calls the "No Good." One afternoon, Sophie breaks the rules, ventures out, and meets Joey and his two aunts. It is this loving family that gives Sophie the courage to look into her past. What she discovers changes her world forever. . . .

The riveting stories of Emmy and Sophie—alternating narratives of loss, imprisonment, and freedom regained—escalate with breathless suspense toward an unforgettable climax.

My thoughts:
You Are My Only is told from the two perspectives of Emmy and Sophie. Emmy's story takes place within the time she loses Baby up to the more recent years of Sophie's story (2004). It took me a few pages to understand the writing style and what the author was trying to convey in her book, but once I was able to pick it up, I knew that this book would stay with me for quite some time after I've finished.

I'll be completely honest, I preferred Sophie's story over Emmy's, because it's where the YA factor lies. And though I preferred Sophie's chapter's over Emmy's I was no less emotionally touched by Emmy. The way she felt when she learned she had lost Baby and the physical and emotional struggles she suffered through to find her child had an impact on me. Though I'm not a mother, I've taken care of my brother as if he were my own and to try to imagine losing him like that, physically hurt to think about. I felt that there was something more to Emmy, that she may have had a mental disability that hindered her thinking in a normal manner that only made her story that much more heartbreaking. Emmy's chapters were short, but (for me) they were enough to understand her and follow her along.

Sophie is a fourteen year old girl who has been kept sheltered from the world, hiding from what her mother calls "The No-Good", but when she meets Joey she begins to come into her self and starts to break rules. Every time a Sophie chapter started, I was immediately engrossed, I wanted to know everything about her. With Sophie, I wanted to scream at the book for letting her mother control her life in such a way that she had to sneak out to visit with the neighbor and his aunts. But when she finally started to search in her past when some things didn't add up, I was cheering her along the way.

There just wasn't enough Sophie. At all. I would have loved to see how she spent her time when she wasn't with Joey, or trying to please her mother. I kind of felt like Emmy's story overshadowed Sophie's a little. When their timelines began to line up is where the climax begins and you just can't put it down.

I read a majority of this book at my brother's football practice and I made my mom stay about 10 minutes after so I could finish the book.

I can't wait to read more from Beth Kephart, she knows how to tell a story.