Carry Me Home by Jessica Therrien

🌟🌟🌗 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Synopsis:
Lucy and Ruth are country girls from a broken home. When they move to the city with their mother, leaving behind their family ranch and dead-beat father, Lucy unravels.

They run to their grandparents’ place, a trailer park mobile home in the barrio of San Jose. Lucy’s barrio friends have changed since her last visit. They’ve joined a gang called VC. They teach her to fight, to shank, to beat a person unconscious and play with guns. When things get too heavy, and lives are at stake, the three girls head for LA seeking a better life.

But trouble always follows Lucy. She befriends the wrong people, members of another gang, and every bad choice she makes drags the family into her dangerous world.

Told from three points of view, the story follows Lucy down the rabbit hole, along with her mother and sister as they sacrifice dreams and happiness, friendships and futures. Love is waiting for all of them in LA, but pursuing a life without Lucy could mean losing her forever.

Ultimately it’s their bond with each other that holds them together, in a true test of love, loss and survival.

*I received this copy from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review*

I appreciated the subject matter that the book deals with because there are not very many books that discuss gangs. I thought that it was interesting to see the progression of indoctrination into a gang through Lucy. I would have liked to have seen to book focus more on the gang aspect rather than dealing with many other issues. I felt like the author took on too much by adding so many other things to the story. This also may have hurt the pacing of the book because it was a bit slow but with a few tense filled scenes in the first half and then the pacing picks up in the second half making it difficult to process everything going on.

I found it hard to connect with the book which made it difficult to read. I'm not sure if this is because the things that Lucy deals with are hard to read about or if I found it hard to connect with the story and characters as a whole. I think that it may have been a bit of both. I feel that the things that Lucy deals with are at times glanced over rather than spoken about with emotional depth. It seems almost as if the author is saying that things affected the character but when I was reading it, I wasn't feeling that she was as affected as was stated. 

I found it hard to fully connect with the characters due to this and traits that the characters possessed. I wanted the mother to be to be strong enough to stand on her own two feet instead of being helpless and leaning on everyone around her. I found it hard to understand Lucy and why she went down certain paths in the book. I found myself becoming angry at her towards the beginning of the book and by the time I finished reading I was glad that I didn't have to live in her head anymore. She was such a frustrating character who seemed gullible and ignorant. Ruth was the only character that I can say that I liked. I related to her in quite a few ways which in turn helped me to sympathize with what she was forced to deal with.