Night Owls - Jenn Bennett

Night Owls by Jenn Bennett
Published on August 13, 2015 by Simon & Schuster UK

Feeling alive is always worth the risk. 

Meeting Jack on the Owl—San Francisco's night bus—turns Beatrix's world upside down. Jack is charming, wildly attractive...and possibly one of San Francisco's most notorious graffiti artists. 

But Jack is hiding a piece of himself. On midnight rides and city rooftops, Beatrix begins to see who this enigmatic boy really is.

Night Owls or The Anatomical Shape of a Heart in the US edition focuses on Beatrix, a high school student that wishes to become a anatomy books illustrator because of this she ends up meeting Jack, on a Owl, and this whole story unravels.

I was a bit scary at first of the artist aspect of the story, I think it's because artists are usually pictured as tortured souls and all that shit, so I usually run from these kind of stories, this was not the case here, the art of both Beatrix and Jack do reflect on their personal feelings but it's much more than that, it's an intrinsic part of who they are and their characters.

And the story doesn't focus only on their art, each of them have this whole fleshed out life. The family of both characters are really present in the story and I loved this, each had their problems to overcome and it made me emotional so many times, I even cried out a little bit. There were some hard topics to be dealt with here and I feel like Bennett did a great job, with the divorce aspects and the mental health.

What made this one not be an instant favorite for me was that the romance took a while to be shippy levels to me, especially because of Jack's character arc. See, Jack is holding up on things at the start and most of it is understandable, there is some hard stuff with his family and it's hard to trust someone to tell it, but this made me not be all that sympathetic of him and a lot of times it seemed like Beatrix was opening herself up to him only to be shut out of his life. This changes of course, but it was only latter on in the story so it tool a tool on my enjoyment.

Other than that I don't really have complaints about this story, it was a touching tale about first love and family, and it made me cry a bit more than once. Definitely recommend to lovers of YA contemporary.