I am full of regret. I didn’t expect to be full of regret, but I have started a journey and a quest that I cannot back down from. After suffering from a book hangover due to finishing Onyx Storm, I felt inspired. I knew that I would need something to do while Lucas was away because I read far more than normal when he’s not around. So, to help combat the sadness, I decided, well before Lucas even left that I was going to read every single one of Rebecca Yarros’s books and write a review on every single one. Keep in mind, these reviews will be very unpolished and probably all over the place, but that, I think, will be part of the fun.
I’m only one book in, and I fear that I already regret this journey. Not because the first book was bad – it was the exact opposite; it was very good – but because of how way too relatable it was. Despite the warning at the start of the book, I was apparently not fully prepared. I think I need compensation for the emotional damages.
The first book on this journey takes us all the way back to 2014 and the start of Rebecca’s Flight and Glory series. This series revolves around military couples and military families and all of the complications and heartbreak and love that comes with it. Our first entry into this series? Full Measures.
Full Measures throws us right into the heartache and devastation that comes with losing someone in a tragic way. We meet Ember, who starts off her day like any other, only to open the front door and have her entire world shatter as she is given the news of her father’s death in Afghanistan. The tears at this point were immediate because I have had the very experience of the confusion of having someone coming to the door to deliver the worst possible news in your life. In just three knocks on the door, everything just falls apart, and the idea of moving forward feels impossible.
It was almost too relatable to the point where I wanted to put the book down. But I continued on because I am both a glutton for punishment, and this was not a challenge I wanted to give up on. By the end, I’m glad I didn’t.
In the wake of receiving this news – on her birthday, no less – Ember quickly realizes that she has to try and keep her family together. Her mother has immediately shut down, her younger sister is old enough to understand, but in the midst of her teenage years, and Ember wants nothing more than to preserve her little brother’s innocence. Eventually she has to tell her little brother, Gus, the truth, and through it all, Gus just wants Ember to still have her birthday. With a burning desire to hang onto that one wish of Gus’s, Ember makes her way to the store to put together the semblance of a birthday for herself, but realizes that she forgot that her wallet as she was preparing to go on a run before her world fell apart. It’s here that we meet Josh Walker, hockey star and Ember’s high school crush.
The entirety of this book is about getting through and processing devastating loss along with the complicated feelings that come with it. It’s about learning to survive and learning to live again in a world that’s completely changed. Despite it all, Ember starts to figure it out. But not without challenges.
At the beginning of the book, we see Ember at her lowest. Considering the state of her mother, she is forced to pick up the pieces and become the responsible one. She’s the one that makes sure that Gus gets to his hockey practices, she’s the one who has to make sure that her sister is doing what she needs to do – she has to do it all. While she has the assistance of her grandmother, it’s Josh who provides a lot of assistance and does whatever he can. In fact, he calls himself her “whatever” for whatever it is that Ember needs. He becomes Ember’s rock through it all.
We see Ember as she starts to put herself back together, finding herself and trying to be true to herself in the aftermath of everything all with Josh by her side. She waffles between whether or not she’s ready to handle a relationship for most of the book. This is even more understood when we all learn that her boyfriend of 3 years had been sleeping with her college roommate for a year, leading Ember to spiral out and right into Josh’s arms.
Josh, being the gentleman he is, allows Ember to get out her feelings to some degree before putting a stop and telling her that she isn’t ready and that she’s acting on emotion. Though he admits to being interested, he doesn’t want Ember to do something that she doesn’t regret. This is the mentality that he maintains for the entirety of the book until Ember is finally in a place that she can make educated decisions for herself. It was exactly what she needed, and it was something I appreciated as a reader who’s gone through traumatic events. It’s so easy to be taken advantage of when exceptionally vulnerable, so having Josh look out for that was lovely.
By the end I was truly rooting for Ember and Josh and their growth. And I felt this even more after the plot twist came in the end. I don’t know at what point I figured it out, and even though I knew it was coming, I was still wrecked.
All of that being said, for this being Rebecca’s debut novel, it was excellent, although parts of it felt rushed. It felt like there would be moments of gratifying intensely written emotions that pulled you in and hit all the feels, but then the next things would just zoom by. It wasn’t terrible but it was noticeable and sometimes it took me out of the book. On the plus side, I was very quickly swept back into the story and was able to continue on with Ember and Josh’s journey.
But the angst and the emotions that were written into this book were incredible, and I understood so much of Ember’s story from start to finish. From the knocks at the door to the anxieties and desire to avoid experiencing that scenario all over again, I understood. This book was real, and it was raw, and I was torn to shreds repeatedly from how many tears were shed. There’s a part at the end of the book where Ember is confronted with whether her heart or her fear is going to win out, and I felt this struggle so much.
Even though I’m not with someone in the military, I do struggle a lot with Lucas’s career, and that’s something that Ember finds herself struggling with in the end. The waiting and the uncertainty of being with someone in a dangerous career path is terrifying and it’s a hard pill to swallow. You know what you want, but then you have to sit with yourself and really think of the reality of what it is that you’re getting into. It’s not an easy decision, and it’s very easy to let your mind win out in this situation, but the heart wants what the heart wants sometimes.
And the coming home always makes it worth it.
If you’re someone who is willing to take on a heartbreaking but also extremely hopeful and incredibly emotional book where you will cry, I definitely recommend this book. I give it 4 stars out of 5 because of the pacing issues I mentioned above, but it’s a winner that I will probably reread in the future. In the meantime, onto book two – Eyes Turned Skyward. Let’s see if I can get through the first chapter without immediately bursting into tears.
Until next time.
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[…] after finishing Full Measures, all I could think was, Please let us see stories from the other characters. More specifically, I […]