Reality Bites! Let's Get Lost!: Review: The Mason List by S.D. Hendrickson

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An epic love. An epic hate. An epic story that would last a lifetime.

Today, 8:15 p.m.
I hurt. I hurt so deeply, I felt the pain searing in my bones and jabbing like a hot poker into my heart. I knew nothing would make it better as the memories pulled from the crevices of my mind, detailing the bad and the ugly, filling my thoughts with regret as I slipped into the darkness. . .

When I was eight, my mother was dying of cancer, my father lost his job, and the bank kicked us out of our house. I was forced to move to the strange town of Arlis, Texas where my father and I slept in our car in the hospital parking lot. Desperate and hopeless, we lived on fumes of our former life.

Then one night, everything changed forever. A knock on the car window brought a family into my life that I only wanted to shut out. I hated charity and I hated the Masons. Well, except one. He made it impossible to hate him.

Jess Mason had the biggest blue eyes and ornery smile of any boy I had ever seen. He was a ray of sunshine in my dark world. A boy full of adventure, dragging me across the meadow of Sprayberry Ranch; a beautiful Texas paradise full of horses and tree houses that got us into more trouble than anyone ever imagined.

Jess was my everything as a kid until we grew up and the rules changed. Instead of living happily ever after with a boy full of love. . . I destroyed it.
- Alex Tanner

Author Note: The Mason List is a coming-of-age story that follows the life of Alex Tanner from the age of six to twenty-six. The novel crosses the genres of Young Adult and New Adult. The Mason List is a standalone, 118,940 word, full-length novel.

WOW.

This book.

I love stumbling upon books like this one! They make me feel like I hit the book lottery. See, I'm what you could consider an emotional reader. I like to connect with the characters on a personal level. I want to feel all the emotions they are feeling. I want to be so immersed in the story that I forget the rest of the world around me exist.

The Mason List is a book that definitely gave me all of that and SO much more.

This book is a friends to lover type story (my favorite kind!). You will feel as though you're part of Jess and Alex's journey from young children with too much time on their hands (oh, the trouble they get into!!) to adults, trying to find their place in the world. The progression of their relationship will seem almost inevitable. But circumstances will continue to get in the way and their friendship is put to the ultimate test.

There is a perfect balance of angst, humor, heat, heartbreak and every other emotion you can possibly think of. The author did an amazing job of truly portraying all the emotions the characters were feeling at any given moment in their lives. My heart ached for Alex and all that her little eight year old self had to go through. My gut twisted at the mistakes she made along the way.

I seriously could go on and on and on about all the feels this book gave me. But I'm going to end my review here. This is a book you have to experience for yourself to truly understand what I'm trying to convey in my review. If you're in doubt, just download the sample, that alone with give you a taste of the amazing writing and powerful story that is The Mason List!