Katie Cotugno's How to Love, is a teenage crush fest that turns serious, in a snap, #fictionreview, #YA

Katie Cotugno's debut, How to Love, is a teenage crush fest that turns serious, in a snap, as the main characters juggle love, sex, babies, prescription pill abuse, drunk driving, and other hot button issues that hang on their peer group like mosquitoes in the hot Florida summer.

Cotugno nails teenage love/lust for the technology native set.  The protagonist Reena (short for Serena) Moreno has been in love with childhood friend, Sawyer LeGrande, since the two shared playpens while their parents dreamed of owning and running resturants in the jazz piano night. In fact, the two are almost star-crossed, as Reena's father doesn't trust Sawyer, and Sawyer's posh mother doesn't recognize Reena as remotely anything resembling a person.

The back and forth narrative device Cotugno uses is perfect for pulling romantic tension tight. The novel begins in the present, in the "After," as Reena discovers her long lost friend/lover at the Slurpee machine, and poor old Reena is once again suckered by Sawyer's charms, his comfortable scent, his cheesy grin. Sawyer's not a bad guy; he's a troubled guy trying to figure out how to be a man, and he spends most of the present tense proving to those around him that he has changed.

How he has changed remains shrouded in mystery at first, but is uncovered as Cotugno unwraps the layers of novel's onion.

Sawyer is very much like his name. He evokes boyish charm, and smarts like Tom Sawyer, and has a rakish past like ABC's Lost's Sawyer, and everything about him, for Reena and other teenager girls, is larger than life. He's got groupies, already, and plays in a band, and manages to come up with all the right things to say.  Throw in his half-silver moon necklace, the way he stands behind the bar at work, how he takes jazz piano lessons from Reena's stubbornly silent father, and Cotugno's got herself a boho hunk in the making.

The main conflict is between Sawyer and everybody else as he tries to get back with Reena, and her daughter, his daughter, Hannah, a byproduct of "Before," which is the recent past of Reena's final two years of high school when life became sudden, serious, and present. The feelings the adults have about Sawyer are mixed, and mostly of the protective variety. Reena has suffered much in the years Sawyer has been away. She takes community college classes, juggles chores as a single mom living with her parents, and even has a nice non-pushy boyfriend, the kind that you know will get the proverbial hatchet once Sawyer has settled back into the muggy Florida nights.

The prose is lyrical and tense, and Cotugno has a way of making you dig your nails in as the characters move closer and closer together. It's teenage love written as if National Security is on the line, and you can't help but root for Reena, AP takin'-graduatin'-early-avoidin'-drama hero, balancing friends, a job at the family resturant, and her obsession with Sawyer LeGrande.

That is until drama finds her.

What's great about this debut is that the reader knows more or less what is going to play out between the two characters. But that's not the point. Cotugno tells us in the first chapter that Sawyer and Reena hook up, at least once, and conceive a beautiful baby.  The point is the journey of love. How it takes you places where you never thought you'd go. For Reena that means reaching an emotional bottom that she can't really see out of, and is maybe, just maybe, crawling out of it when Sawyer shows up and kicks her back to the bottom again.

The pleasure and joy is watching this romance blossom from a secret romance to a family scandal and finally into a portrait of modern family life in America. Cotugno's secondary characters carry a lot of the load, issue-wise, and in this way Reena is connected to the coming out drama of her new best friend, the ramifications of her old BFF's drunk-driving accident, her father's heart troubles, and even Sawyer's addiction. True, many of the issues Cotugno's characters face do not drive the plot, and even resolve themselves a little too nicely, but the real story here is between two characters who live and breathe each other, even when they don't want to. Even with all that life throws at them, the real focus here is on the relationships, on the heart, as the characters learn how to love after everyone that they care about has hurt them terribly.