Samantha Carmichael has always lived with the expectations of her politician father dictating her every move. But a summer spent with her ailing grandmother will change her outlook, and change her plans for the future. 
 Jaxson Callahan had a difficult life -- a mother who didn't protect him from harm, a father who was a monster, and a community that expected the worse from him. It wasn't until he met Samantha that he began to pull himself out of the dark head-space he lived in. 
 Here's the trouble I had with this book. I spent the first part having a very hard time liking Jaxson, and wondering where Sam saw all the good she claimed to see in him. He is angry, closed-off, and hot and cold. His lack of consistent reactions around Samantha made it hard to know what he was really feeling, or how honest he was being when he proclaimed his love. 
 The setting was as important to the storyline as the characters themselves. This small seaside town hid both Sam and Jax's family secrets. But the secrets that are revealed explained so much about both Sam and Jax, and once I knew all those secrets, I could do nothing but root for them to figure things out. 
 I loved the side characters who interacted with Sam and Jax. Pete and Bonnie were a safe haven for Jax and became a font of knowledge for Sam. Hadley had nothing but Sam's best interest at heart, even when she was making snap judgements about Jax. 
 This story had some great twists that made it so different than anything else I've read in recent memory. It was heartwarming, and tragic, and a perfectly imperfect love story. It wasn't an easy read, and it wasn't always a happy read, but it was challenging in the best possible way, and those challenges made the reading that much more engrossing. I didn't always like what I was reading, and my emotions ran down my face on several occasions, but it also made me think, made me feel, and made me hope. 
 I debated for several days as far as how to rate this. There were parts that I didn't like as I was reading them. But it wasn't the writing, it wasn't the characters, and ultimately I had to admit that though it wasn't what I was expecting, it worked for the story, and it worked for these two. I finally decided that this book had made me think and question so much, and for so long after I finished reading, that I couldn't give it less than 5 stars. 
 I was gifted a copy in exchange for an honest review.