Crash by Lisa McMann

Crash:
Jules lives with her family above their restaurant, which means she smells like pizza most of the time and drives their double-meatball-shaped food truck to school. It’s not a recipe for popularity, but she can handle that.

What she can’t handle is the recurring vision that haunts her. Over and over, Jules sees a careening truck hit a building and explode...and nine body bags in the snow.

The vision is everywhere—on billboards, television screens, windows—and she’s the only one who sees it. And the more she sees it, the more she sees. The vision is giving her clues, and soon Jules knows what she has to do. Because now she can see the face in one of the body bags, and it’s someone she knows. Someone she has been in love with for as long as she can remember.

I absolutely love Lisa McMann’s writing style and her story telling, it’s always filled with suspense and chilling atmospheres: Crash was no disappointment. This was a thrilling read from start to finish, and as intense as it was (or maybe because of), I finished it in one day. The repetitive visions heightened my heart rate and made me feel like I was running out of time, like if I didn't read fast enough Jules was going to lose the chance to save all those people. This book tugged my emotions in every way possible and I completely understood Jules’ love/hate relationship with her feelings for Sawyer (been there-done that, got the postcard). The story definitely has a Romeo and Juliet vibe to it (without the whole death and destruction at the end), two families feuding and the children caught up in the middle. And while the romance is not a strong theme in this book, it is a part of it and I love that there was not the typical YA love triangle to wade through. Lisa’s characters are always powerful and honest despite her terse-no-words-wasted writing style (which I love by the way!). Crash also contains characters suffering from mental illness, and Lisa does not gloss over the darker side of the disease.  There was also an interesting twist at the end that I didn’t see coming, so I’m definitely looking forward to the next book.

Jules has been seeing the same vision for months now and as details slowly reveal themselves she discovers that maybe, just maybe she can figure out what it means in time to save everybody. But there are times that she thinks that she is going insane, but she feels that she must do what is right and warn one of the victims—even if he doesn’t believe her. And of course he doesn’t, even when she admits her feelings have not changed, that she still cares for him as more than a friend. As Jules slowly sorts out the visions warning, she begins to believe that she really is going insane. But if there is a chance that what she sees is going to come true, she knows that she must do what is right and in order to save all those people…it might cost her something unimaginable.