Kelsie Sullivan’s life has changed forever. The once outgoing cheerleader has a secret to hide. The car accident that killed her best friend Jenna? She caused it.
With an absent father and unforgiving stepmother, Kelsie has nowhere to turn. She manages her guilt and grief with razor blades. The fleeting release she experiences becomes an obsession and soon she can no longer hide it. Once her cutting is revealed, Kelsie’s parents enroll her in a Wilderness Therapy program designed to rehabilitate troubled teens, but North Carolina is a world away from California.
Kelsie fights against everything the program has to offer until she befriends JC, a boy with a tortured past of his own. He’s also the only one who is able to ease her pain. The two grow close, but quickly discover that nature—both human and elemental—can easily rip them apart.
Disclaimer: This book contains adult language, sexual themes, and explicit self-harm behavior. Parental discretion is recommended for those under 15 years of age.
Reading the blurb for Breaking Free I was very intrigued. I love a good coming of age story and something about it just called to me. A book about two tortured souls… sounds right up my alley! I love it when a book explores the thoughts of overcoming great hardships and seeing the growth in the characters as they find themselves. SM Koz takes us on a journey of Kelsie Sullivan whose life has been turned upside down and even though the journey is not an easy one, she discovers more than just to love herself but love is more than just skin deep. There were plot twists that I honestly never saw coming and made me fall in love with the story even more. Love knows no color and SM Koz shows us that in Breaking Free.
I loved how the story unfolds. When Kelsie receives a journal from an out of state address for her campmate JC, she sits down and tells her the story past of events that leads up to her summer at Wilderness Camp and what happens while she is there. Within the story she goes back and forth between past and present events and it truly feels like you are sitting around the kitchen table listening to Kelsie and her story. She is sent to Wilderness Camp as her depression and cutting starts to spiral out of control after the death of her best friend. Wilderness Camp is for troubled teens and an alternative therapy to dealing with issues like drug abuse, bulimia, and other behavior issues. It’s a rigorous 30 day camping excursion in the woods involving hiking, team building, and self-exploration through daily journal entries. Kelsie hates being there. She is forced to be there or attend military school.
“After four hours of my own thoughts, I needed to cut. It was overwhelming. My stomach hurt, my chest hurt. It was as if a sumo wrestler was sitting on top of me. The harder I tried to breathe the more it hurt.”
What she doesn’t expect to get is a friendship with JC. A mysterious boy from South Carolina that intrigues Kelsie. On the outside he appears to be “normal”. There was a reason he was sent to Wilderness Camp and but she fails to pry out of him why. As they spend more time together the more their friendship blossoms. As she reads the journal to her Nanny, Kelsie slowly but surely is able to get inside of JC’s head and learn so much about him.
So much happens during their time at Wilderness Camp and the events leading up to their early departure. JC is convinced one of the fellow campers is set there to attack him. After several accidents things start to go from bad to worse. On a night of a rainstorm, another accident causes Kelsie and another camper to hike back and get help. The events leading to this had me on edge and I could not put down my kindle!
What happens after leaves Kelsie feeling like she has the kiss of death. But when her Nanny takes her on a trip to visit her daughter in the hospital, more twist are revealed and has Kelsie questioning everything she thought she knew. Kelsie’s journey out of depression and cutting is not an easy road. Will she be able to break free from that that hold her down and to discover that you don’t need to be related to have a family. That love will find a way if you open your heart to it.
“It don’t take blood to make a family. Just love.””
SM Koz weaves a story of finding yourself through heartache and guilt derived from tragic accidents and learning the love of family, friends and a caring & understanding boy can actually help you heal in Breaking Free. Be prepared to laugh, smile and cry while reading this book, which I highly recommend to all! I give this tale 4 bright stars, it moved me beyond words.
"Like this cake. On the outside, we've got all the pretty decorations like sprinkles that make people think they know who we are, but those decorations might not match what's on the inside."
The story opens up with Kelsie at her psychatrists office, refusing to engage in the conversation he is trying to have with her. She finally leaves with her Nanny (yes at 17 she has a Nanny) where she receives a package from an address that she doesn't recognize. Upon opening the package, she is thrown into the very recent past, as she stares at the journal of her close friend JC, whom she met at Wilderness Therapy. Once home with the journal she begins to read, and the narration goes back and forth between the present and the past, which is told by JC's journal entries with Kelsie filling in more details.
Kelsie is lost after losing her best friend Jenna in a tragic car accident, that she feels extremely guilty for. She begins to cut herself to dull the pain that she feels because of Jenna's death, refusing to talk about that night or even visit her best friend's grave. After her step-mother finally gives up trying to "help" her, she sends Kelsie to Wilderness Therapy for thirty days, making sure that she knows that if she messes up there, military school is the next step. A girlie girl cheerleader from California who has never hiked in the outdoors, who's pack weighs more than she does, has no chance of surviving thirty days in the woods, that is until a friendship begins to form between her and JC. JC begins to pull her out of her shell, and he helps her to realize that she can accept what happened, accept that she is someone who cuts and try to use other ways to ease her emotional pain. Through the entries in JC's journal the reader learns that he developed more than feelings of friendship for Kelsie, who he nicknamed Mal, but she insists that they were just friends and she didn't feel that way about him. She continually thinks that she ruins everything and everyone she cares about, Jenna and JC included, making the reader ask the ever hovering question, what happned to JC?
The story continues with revelations that you would never expect, and that lead Kelsie to a road to living a healthy, guilt free life without cutting. Each page that I turned moved me a little bit more, and I needed to know how things turned out for Kelsie. Although she didn't have her traditional happily ever after that you find in most books, she was happier than when the story began and she was on her way to fully healing.
SM Koz was born in Michigan, but moved to North Carolina for college and never left.
She enjoys traveling, camping, hiking, photography, reading, spending time with foster kids who call her house home, and learning new things. When she’s not creating online training for pharmaceutical companies (her day job) or writing, Koz can be found at the local community college taking courses on various topics ranging from digital art to HTML to desktop publishing. Next in line are auto mechanics and cake decorating.
Being trained as a veterinarian, it’s not surprising that Koz and her husband were recently told they have a mini-zoo with their two dogs, fish, cockatiels, and foster cats. In the past, they have also had parakeets and a snake. Other than the fish, all the animals were acquired through rescue organizations, something Koz wholeheartedly supports.
Breaking Free is Koz’s third original novel and fifth overall, but the only one she feels compelled to publish at this time. Her hope is that individuals who struggle with cutting may be inspired by Kelsie’s story and find the strength they need to begin the healing process.
