Aix Marks the Spot by S.E. AndersonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Jamie has been dreaming of this summer forever: of road trips and intensive art camps, of meeting cute boys with her best friend Jazz. What she didn’t count on was the car accident.
Exiled away from her family as her mother slowly learns to walk again, Jamie is sent to Provence and trapped in an isolated home with the French grandmother she has never met, the guilt of having almost killed her parents, and no Wi-Fi. Enough to drive a girl mad. That is, until, she finds an old letter from her father, the starting point in a treasure hunt that spans across cities and time itself. Somehow, she knows that the treasure is the key to putting her shattered family back together and that whatever lies at the end has the power to fix everything.
Armed only with a high-school-level of French and a map of local train lines, she must enlist the aid of Valentin, her handsome neighbor who’s willing to translate. To save her family, she has castle ruins to find and sea cliffs to climb; falling for her translator wasn’t part of her plan…
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Okay, so quite simply I couldn’t read this book fast enough! It was just so good. You know those books that keep you up until the early hours because you just have to know what happens? Well, AIX MARKS THE SPOT is definitely one of them.
It is a YA contemporary that tells the story of Jamie as she’s exiled away to France to live with the grandmother she’s never met. Oh and she doesn’t speak French, and the grandmother doesn’t speak English. Immediate conflict—plus the lingering question over why Jamie’s parents are estranged from the grandmother to start with.
And the backstory of Jamie’s mother’s injury is so well developed and incorporated smoothly into the narrative. Plus, how Jamie thinks she can heal her mother by her own actions in France bring in an element of magical thinking and false belief that isn’t often explored in YA fiction—or at least I’ve not come across it before.
Anderson is a master at characterisation. I immediately loved Jamie and Valentin, and loved the grandmother (in the kind of way you love complex characters who seem dark).
And the love story! Or should I say stories. This book has one love story wrapped up in another—it’s so good!
But there’s some really powerful and poignant stuff in here too. Many sentences made me pause and think deeply—you know the kind of writing I mean? The ones that just make you think how delicious this book is?
Oh and there’s humour too! A certain video scene had me laughing out loud.
This book has got everything you could possibly want in a YA contemporary: a complex exploration of family and redemption, powerful characters, and a look at how tragedy can lead to love, all wrapped up in a fun, treasure-hunt-style game.
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