Reviewed by Dan
TITLE: Ethan
AUTHOR: Ryan Loveless
PUBLISHER: Harmony Ink Press
LENGTH: 210 Pages
RELEASE DATE: October 20, 2016
BLURB:
School-wide, fifteen-year-old Carter Stevenson is known as “that twitchy, stuttering kid” thanks to his Tourette’s syndrome. After a disastrous talent show places him at the center of attention, he dreams of disappearing. When his parents announce the family is moving cross-country, that dream comes true. He’ll lay low through the summer in his new quiet California town, and when school starts, he’ll keep to himself. No one will ever be the wiser.
He doesn’t anticipate Ethan.
Seventeen-year-old Ethan Hart, the neighbors’ older son, is a few years into recovery from a traumatic brain injury. He is sensitive, joyous, and uninhibited. To him, Carter moves like the music only Ethan sees. He knows he and Carter are destined to be best friends and then boyfriends, if only Carter would get on the same wavelength.
Carter isn’t sure about a social life, but as Ethan introduces him to a new world of friends who accept him, tics and all, he starts to see the bright side of not hiding away.
Adapted as a YA edition of the award-winning novel Ethan, Who Loved Carter by Ryan Loveless.
REVIEW:
I’m going to be brutally honest with this review. I’ve been sitting here looking at my keyboard and wondering what I was going to say. Honesty is always the best practice, so here goes.
Ethan is being billed as a YA edition of the author’s very successful book, Ethan, Who Loved Carter. I would not recommend you read both books. I would also have to tell you that there is still a lot of sex related discussion in the new book, which I personally think is more New Adult, rather than Young Adult. I’m no expert on where those lines meet though, so I could be incorrect in my thinking.
I have no idea why the author and the publisher decided to do a YA version of a book that was as great as Ethan, Who Loved Carter. I also have absolutely no idea why you would take that book, and try to adapt the story by making a few tweaks to the characters’ ages and think it would be as good as the original. Taking Carter and Ethan and removing about 10 years from their ages, but leaving the majority of the book as it was just didn’t work for me, like at all. I made the mistake of reading this book just one week after reading and reviewing Ethan, Who Love Carter, which I gave a 5 “Love Bytes” rating to last week. I adored that book and its story. The author got Ethan’s character spot on. I attend a brain tumor support group and many of my friends have greater brain damage done by their surgeries than I do. I could feel Ethan because of the same symptoms my friends experience in everyday life. That first book was very well done.
As much as I tried to be objective and keep the two books apart in my head, I couldn’t. My memory isn’t what it used to be, but I’d have to say that the majority of this new book is copied word for word from the original, with minor tweaks made to it to try to be character age appropriate. And some of those tweaks just plain didn’t work…at all. Like a scene at the beach, where Carter isn’t drinking because Ethan can’t. Well, duh, in this book Carter is sixteen years old. He wouldn’t be drinking, now would he? And the part of the book where Ethan’s parents went away to see the critically ill aunt. Carter was still left in charge to babysit. That worked when he was twenty-five, but in this book he is roughly the same age as Elliot, Ethan’s younger brother. That didn’t work in my opinion.
I also thought by introducing parents for Carter that it threw off the dynamic between the two characters. It reduced them in my eyes.
I’m sorry to say that I am not recommending this book. It might be a fit for the New Adult market, but I feel it has issues. I appreciate the writer’s talent, and of course will read future works, but this one didn’t do it for me. To summarize my feelings on the book. I think this book is good, but it is a flawed copy of the original. Kind of like a copy of the Mona Lisa, that left off the enigmatic smile.
RATING: 
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